A new comedy presented at the Edinburgh festival fringe this summer will imagine what happened before and after the real-life event when the future PM took to the stage as Shakespeare's brazen villain.
Adam Meggido was inspired to write the play Boris the Third after reading an article that described the 18-year-old Johnson's blustering performance in the school production. Eric Anderson, a former headteacher at Eton, once summed it up thus: "He hadn't had time to learn the lines, so had pasted them up behind various pillars. The whole performance consisted of him running from one side of the stage to the other and failing to read it properly."
So, said Meggido, the teenage Johnson, who will be played by Harry Kershaw, "literally moved from pillar to post to read his lines".
"He resorted to making stuff up and clowning. That is as much as we believe happened. The rest in my play is conjecture."
This story is from the June 10, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the June 10, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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