THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
It starts deadly quiet as a golf cart enters and slowly circles a golf green. Then you spot that hair, that profile and for a minute you think is this a hologram, but no, it's apparently Bertie Carvel underneath the most incredible make-up job (kudos to Richard Mawbey) playing the 45th President of the United States, who has his eyes on also becoming The 47th.
The team that enjoyed West End and Broadway success with King Charles III has reconvened under director Rupert Goold to deliver another modern fantasia, this time about the man Spike Lee calls 'Agent Orange'.
You might think, do I really need to see this? How can you parody a caricature? Hasn't the ban by Twitter given us all a much-deserved break? But, Mike Bartlett presents us here with an intriguing prospect. It is 2024 and the big question is, will HE run? Simon Williams (Upstairs, Downstairs and The Archers), struggling to be anything other than British, plays a starkly diminished Joe Biden, who is spooked after encountering Trump at Carter's funeral (spoiler alert, I suppose) who whispers a threat "We know about Jill" in his ear. Then things get heightened if not a tad hysterical. A deal is done for Biden to resign and Kamala to take over, not long before the election. At the debate things deteriorate rapidly.
As with King Charles III it is cleverly written in blank verse giving the whole thing a perfectly apt Shakespearean resonance. We get shades of the History Plays, the Roman Tragedies and a clear allusion to King Lear, when Trump convenes his three needy offspring to cruelly divide them with decisions about his legacy.
The piece works because of the great dialogue (it wouldn't have worked straight), the ensemble acting, Goold's tight direction and Miriam Buether's simple but effective design, which gives it a dynamism. The downside is that it flatters both Trump and Harris too much. Bartlett, at least in this scheme, can't avoid making Trump much more articulate than he is, and also more reflective, which we know he isn't. What you see with Trump is always what you get which, of course, has been central to his success. To borrow from Gertrude Stein about LA, with Trump "There is no 'there' there". He does however understand his enemies really well and his quip "Nobody knew what Hillary really craved, but they all new 5 things I would do" isn't far wrong.
Carvel is astonishing. He doesn't settle for an impersonation or get submerged in the make-up but transcends it all and pulls together so many threads of Trump's personality. Of course, it's a feast for any actor as there is so much to work on but Carvel lets us into the darkness underneath. His only mistake is perhaps giving Trump far more physical energy than he has. This is a man who is daunted by stairs, remember.
The other great success here is Lydia Wilson, gloriously calculating as Ivanka, queen of handbags, a chip off the old block. But she gets cruelly discarded when, interestingly, he's threatened by her overstepping the mark.
Inevitably a play such as this can be dismissed as just playing to a liberal gallery - I can't imagine many GOP'ers in the audience, although they would enjoy it - but it's better than that. Tamara Tunie has the cool elegance and gravitas for Kamala Harris but, in the end, she becomes the liberal savior of us all, which for many may be a stretch. Still, it works dramatically, and she gets some great one-liners.
The piece doesn't avoid a common pitfall of presenting America as doomed and permanently in crisis, quite a Eurocentric view, and the idea that an exhausted America would so easily take to rioting to save's Trumps vision of a new Republic is also dubious. Isn't not running in '24 and eternally droning on about the 'steal' a much more lucrative prospect than running and failing - or worse, running and winning and then thinking "What do I do now?". As even Kamala admits here, "He's no Hitler".
