Vicious: Revered thespians behaving badly

The Binge
By Jessica Zafra
Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi are two of the most esteemed British actors of stage and screen. Theirs are the careers that young thespians aspire to. Between them they have played Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Uncle Vanya, Cyrano, Alan Turing, Magneto, Claudius, and Gandalf. They have played just about every great role we can think of, and now that they’re in their 70s, what is left for them to do? Well, they can play two flamboyant old queens who have carried on a love-hate relationship for 50 years.

It seems disrespectful to refer to these esteemed thespians and LGBT rights campaigners as queens, but that is exactly what makes Vicious entertaining. The audience is urged to disrespect these icons. Jacobi plays Stuart Bixby, who used to manage a bar, and McKellen plays Freddie Thornhill, an infrequently employed actor, on the British sitcom Vicious. The ITV series created by Mark Ravenhill and Gary Janetti, and directed by Ed Bye, is unrepentantly retro — its theme song is the cover of “Never Can Say Goodbye” by The Communards (If you can remember The Communards, go slather on some moisturizer). Stuart and Freddie themselves are retro, permanently inhabiting a time when their dreams could still be realized. The Eighties, roughly.

Stuart was going to be something amazing — what exactly, we never find out, and Freddie was going to be a great actor. Those days are gone, though they would never admit it. Stuart spends all his time managing the household — an arduous job, given his finicky partner — and taking phone calls from his ancient mother Mildred, who still doesn’t get that he and Freddie are a couple. Freddie’s career never took off; his peak was a Smarties commercial with Judi Dench 40 years ago. However, Freddie behaves as if his bit roles on Dr. Who and Downton Abbey were star turns. They spend their days sitting around their comfortable Covent Garden flat, bitching at each other, entertaining their friends, and bitching at them, too.

The bitching is not particularly clever. “You’re never going to pass as straight,” Freddie tells Stuart. “You’re making that rug gay just by standing on it.” It’s the way these actors deliver the insults that makes them hilarious. They don’t just sink their teeth into the lines, they chew them into pulp, suck out every bit of juice and gargle with them before spitting them out like cobra venom. Their eyebrows go into orbit, their eyes turn into slits. McKellen adds at least two extra syllables to each sentence, and Jacobi simpers and stamps his feet. Yes, they are ham of the highest-grade cholesterol, and it’s a good thing each episode is less than a half-hour long or the casualty rate among viewers would be criminal.

Subtlety, nuance, deep characterization, insights into the human condition — these are some of the things we will not find in Vicious, but then we don’t turn to this show for those. We’re here for the camp. McKellen and Jacobi stoop to shallow caricatures, and that is precisely why Vicious is delicious: because it’s them.

“What are you thinking?” Stuart asks Freddie at a gathering. “That we know a lot of unattractive people,” Freddie replies. The mostly home-bound couple get regular visits from their friends Violet (Frances de la Tour), a woman desperate for love; Penelope (Marcia Warren), who doesn’t know where she is half the time; and Freddie’s caustic brother Mason (Philip Voss). Their routine is shaken up by the arrival of their new neighbor Ash (Iwan Rheon, the torturer Ramsay Bolton on Game of Thrones), an attractive young man whom Freddie and Violet openly lust after.

“Has anybody ever said that you remind them of Zac Efron?” Violet asks Ash, and the studio audience laughs before they realize that the line isn’t funny at all. “That’s a person, right? Or is it a place?” Violet continues, to more laughter, leaving us to suspect that there’s an open bar at the studio. Poor lovelorn Violet embarks on one sordid love affair after another — the show isn’t just ageist, it’s sexist and everything-ist. It’s cheap, rude and low, dressed up with a prestigious cast.

I especially enjoyed the brief flashback in Season 2, where the young Stuart is played by Samuel Barnett (The History Boys) and young Freddie by Luke Treadaway (who looks exactly like Victor Frankenstein on Penny Dreadful because he is that actor’s twin). To see these young thespians camping it up in the style of their elders — Stuart’s voice is described as “a hissing lisp as if a homosexual balloon was slowly leaking air” — gives one hope for the future. Not really, but it’s actually funny.

The reviews in Britain have been nasty, but the show has been embraced in the US, where it airs on PBS. One suspects that Vicious exists in order to give critics a reason to write the most malevolent reviews they can muster, and that, I think, is a public service.

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