The Week on Stage, from Mike Bartlett’s Scandaltown and The 47th to Wolf Cub

The highs and lows of the week’s theatre

From L-R: ‘Wolf Cub’, ‘Scandaltown’ and ‘The 47th' (Robert Day/Marc Brenner)

This week’s theatre round-up features a Mike Bartlett double bill, as the playwright opens two new plays on the London stage. There’s also a one-woman show at Hampstead Theatre.

Check back next week for another cohort of productions, including Marys Seacole and Punchdrunk’s new immersive production The Burnt City.

The 47th – Old Vic ★★★★☆

As soon as Bertie Carvel’s Donald Trump drives his golf buggy into eyesight, there’s a sense we’re watching something remarkable. Buried under orange-stained prosthetics, Carvel is unrecognisable. Hunched and puckered lipped, he is the full embodiment of the 45th president – with rigid hand gestures, a blond-dyed quiffed hairstyle and all. More than just an impersonation, though, this is a whirlwind, career-defining performance.

Writer Mike Bartlett has crafted an epic. The year is 2024, and Trump is having another bash at the presidency. But, while the play’s events feel eerie in their potential realism, Bartlett’s form is, crucially, theatrical. Written in blank verse, it is a riff on a Shakespearean tragedy. When he gathers his offspring to decide which one gets the reins of his empire, Trump mimics King Lear.

Tamara Tunie and Bertie Carvel in ‘The 47th' (Marc Brenner)

It is in his writing of the everyman that Bartlett’s drama takes shape. The inclusion of a brother (James Cooney) and sister (Ami Tredrea) split over their political ideologies provides a snapshot of a country divided. Trump is so kinetic that it is hard for the others to get a look in. But maybe, that’s the point – to show his allure.

A play critiquing America and its workings staged in London can feel scathing when our own political giants currently have so much to answer for. But it doesn’t diminish The 47th’s mighty effect. So let’s just hope things don’t play out the way Bartlett has written them. Anya Ryan

Read the full review here.

Wolf Cub – Hampstead Theatre ★★★☆☆

In case the flannel shirt and ripped boyfriend jeans weren’t enough of a giveaway, Maxine (Clare Latham) is not like the other girls. An outsider subjected to childhood violence by her father, Maxine grows up having to fend for herself, usually in the form of killing animals with her bare hands. There’s something animalistic about this girl. Something maybe, dare I say it, wolf-like?

In Ché Walker’s one-hander, we meet Maxine at different ages of her childhood and early twenties. Whether she’s playing a weirdly violent kid or a sulky, drug-dealing teen, Latham is a mesmerising performer. Her Maxine is defiant and bolshy, attention-seeking in a way that teeters on the right side of annoying but is totally believable in a character growing up in a home devoid of care.

Clare Latham in ‘Wolf Cub' (Robert Day)

When she’s angry or passionate or in danger, Maxine describes her eyes glowing yellow and fur sprouting from beneath her skin. Initially, I assume she’s speaking literally and we’re about to be treated to Teen Wolf: The One-Woman Show (fake fur and all). But as the play progresses, it morphs into a somewhat ambiguous metaphor. Meanwhile, the story gets more and more outlandish – gangs, crack cocaine and dead priests get a look in – and focus is lost.

Around Maxine, Amy Jane Cook has designed a playground for Latham to hide between spindly trees and gaze up at twinkling fairy light stars. The stage is cleaved in two by a deep geological scar and when an earthquake strikes at the end of the show, light floods from below like the depths of hell. That earthquake exemplifies my trouble with Wolf Cub. It’s a bold, bolshy device that’s never really explained – but my god, does it look good. Isobel Lewis

Scandaltown – Lyric Hammersmith ★☆☆☆☆

The words of Mike Bartlett loom tall over London’s theatres. But, with Scandaltown – the playwright’s third show opening in less than two months – his supremacy has begun to teeter.

It’s a modern twist on a Restoration play, written for a post-lockdown era, so you’d expect it to be a witty interrogation of all things 2022. There’s a receding hair-lined secretary of state, Matt Eaton (Richard Goulding), who is uncannily like Boris Johnson and has haphazardly led the country through “the plague”. But beyond packing in as many contemporary cultural references as possible, Bartlett’s satire about the rich and powerful is underachieving.

It starts as a Twelfth Night-ish quest – Phoebe is desperate to find her brother Jack who has abandoned his good virtues for a life of drug and sex-fuelled fun in London. But with a script so overstuffed with unnecessary characters, this narrative gets pushed to the sidelines.

Cecilia Appiah in ‘Scandaltown' (Marc Brenner)

Split into two hour-long sections, this is a flabby, almost totally unamusing script that is crying out for a good chop. Bartlett is thorough in his millennial-bashing – but his drawing of the young as blinded agents of social justice is nothing novel. His writing never gets to the depths of any real societal analysis.

It’s an extravagant set designed by Good Teeth, but the end result is tacky. The saving grace is the garishly loud costume designed by Kinnetia Isidore that Rachel O’Riordan relies on to carry her oafish direction.

Though we might be having a Mike Bartlett moment, this is a clutter of a parody that sits uneasily alongside his other work. Anya Ryan