A mock-heroic catalogue of contemporary imbeciles

Comedians including Stewart Lee, Mark Steel and Arthur Smith are to perform an updated version of Alexander Pope’s 18th century satire The Dunciad.

The poem, first published in 1728, celebrates a goddess, Dulness, and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and tastelessness to the UK

Last year cartoonist Martin Rowson updated the work as The *untsiad with modern references, which publishers Smokestack Books called ‘a mock-heroic epic Who’s Who of all the greedy mountebanks, liars, knaves, fools and cunts who have brought us to this pass’.

 Now the caricaturist has joined forces with comic Nick Revell to bring the work to the stage, with its London premiere taking place on July 20 at The Cockpit Theatre as part of its Re-Enchant poetry strand. Tickets

The cast also includes comic Rosie Holt, Blackadder star Tim McInnerny, artist Clare Ferguson-Walker, musicians Eliza Carthy and Matt Copson, actor Jack Klaff as well as Rowson, Revell and publisher  Andy Croff, whose company is described as ‘North-East England's premier Marxist-Leninist poetry imprint’.

Writer Jonathan Meades said of Rowson’s book (available here):  ‘Rowson is every but as savage as his precursors gleefully cheerless, gruesomely comic, inimitably unsparing and out to harm the plague of cunts who lurk  everywhere.’

Published: 20 May 2025