Pandemonium review: Armando Iannucci’s cod-literary Covid satire won’t thrill weary audiences

Long before Armando Iannucci was the telly satirist behind squirm-inducingly accurate gems like The Thick of It and The Day Today, he was a postgrad student, dutifully ploughing his way through a thesis on 17th-century religious literature. His debut play Pandemonium is a Covid-era political satire that feels miserably ponderous and out of date, even without the cumbersome references to greats like Milton, Pope, and Shakespeare. open image in gallery ‘A lockdown project’: Paul Chahidi in ‘Pandemonium’ Director Patrick Marber presides over a production that’s got moments of joy and energy, without really coming up with a persuasive answer to the question of how to inject life into this odd beast, cumbersome as those “mermaids” that Victorian conmen would stitch together from the corpses of monkeys and fish. It’s just a shame the surreal weirdness isn’t taken further: heck, even a dance number or two would help dispel this play’s cod-literary dryness.