Theatre review: The 47th

Mike Bartlett has played around with pastiche in the past, never more successfully than when King Charles III took Shakespearean themes and language and applied them to an imagined future of the British Royal family. Later this week he'll be premiering his take on Restoration Comedy, but for The 47th he returns to blank verse, also reuniting with director Rupert Goold, and Lydia Wilson on Lady Macbeth duties, although the venue changes to the much larger Old Vic, befitting a lead character who's fond of a rally: As with the previous production, most of the fictionalised characters aren't played as impressions of the real people, but Donald Trump's mannerisms are so pronounced and familiar that it would be odd not to recreate them. And after a few years of TV work where you could actually tell what his face looked like, Bertie Carvel returns to his days as a theatrical chameleon with a comic but creepily uncanny impersonation of the 45th President of the United States.

But the title character of The 47th is actually Kamala Harris (Tamara Tunie,) who becomes the 47th President when, at Jimmy Carter's funeral (because Bartlett can't do one of these without killing a real person off,) Trump corners Joe Biden (Simon Williams) with a vague but definite threat against the First Lady.

After a month of sleepwalking, compulsively washing his hands after Trump shook his, Biden resigns the presidency in favour of his vice-president. Trump sees Harris as easier to beat than Biden, so has orchestrated a way to make her his opponent for the 2024 election. But he also needs to secure the Republican nomination again, which is where the hapless Ted Cruz (James Garnon) comes in: Claiming to back Cruz, Trump hijacks the convention by fabricating an audience chant for him to run again instead. Soon he's weaselled himself back into position, with daughter Ivanka (Wilson) as his running mate.

In a subplot, political journalist Charlie Takahashi (James Cooney) is horrified to find out that his sister Rosie (Ami Tredrea) is a Trump supporter who's become Ivanka's personal chauffeur, and decides to go undercover in a grass-roots MAGA cell. The plotlines come together when Trump uses his technique of barely-coded messages with plausible deniability to mobilise his supporters in bloody riots across the United States in the runup to the election, and Harris is faced with the dilemma of whether to treat her political opponent as anyone else who incites violence would be, and have him locked up - making him a martyr in the process.

Part of the fun of Charles III was the way it not only used the language and structure of Shakespeare's plays but also threw in little references to them. The 47th is a bit of a blunter instrument in this regard, with a quartet of plays in particular being used as the building blocks: There's Richard III in Trump's opening soliloquy admitting himself the villain of the piece; and later when Heidi Cruz (Jenni Maitland) prophesies his doom like Queen Margaret's curse. Macbeth, of course, in Biden's nocturnal ramblings, although Wilson's Ivanka grows out of her Lady Macbeth role to become someone not to be trifled with, even by her father.

Like King Lear, Trump demands the slippery, jittery Don Jr (Oscar Lloyd,) childlike and detached Eric (Freddie Meredith) and Ivanka compete for his love and inheritance; unlike Lear there's no share on offer to all, only a single winner who'll get everything with the others cast aside (there's never any doubt who the winner will be.) There's also a character who gets violently blinded, and you could possibly argue that Trump's mistreatment of Harris and his nurse (Cherrelle Skeete) is also an inversion of Lear's final scenes, failing to learn the humility his Shakespearean equivalent did, although that might be a push. Finally there's Julius Caesar, with Trump directly lifting Mark Anthony's technique to damn Cruz with faint praise, and the chaos of the later scenes.

Although for the most part the real Royal family proved even more operatically weird than Bartlett's version, his Prince Harry romance subplot did prove uncannily prescient, so The 47th comes with an added layer of dread as to what parts of his latest dystopia will come true. It's part of what makes it a darker, more intense play, although it does also feel less fresh and unpredictable. Maybe it's because this is the playwright's second go around on this particular conceit, or because a lot of what we see has actually already happened, if not quite on the scale we see here. There's even a recurring appearance by the Capitol Riots Shaman (Joss Carter,) lending a touch of the ambiguously mystical element of some of the History plays.

The play gets a solid, intense production from Goold - we haven't seen as much of the flair that first made his name in recent years, but Spring Awakening proved it hasn't left him, and there's occasional flourishes of it here: I particularly liked the chaos of the MAGA riots suddenly dissolving into the cast sitting around the circular thrust of Miriam Buether's set, as Harris' war room convenes.

And if it deals with a very specific and current threat to American democracy, its story feels applicable more widely: As President, the former prosecutor Harris' priority is that the rule of law be followed. Even when there's an internal threat that could be thwarted by underhand means nobody, including herself, can be above the law. It's a theme that hits hard seeing this play on the same day that the Prime Minister and Chancellor of this country have been revealed to have broken the law and then lied about it, and their party has rallied round to insist that an insincere apology should be the end of the matter, and that they're fit to govern.

Inevitably Carvel's performance and the transformation aided by the creative team will be the thing most-remembered about the production; it balances a crowd-pleasing comic turn with genuine menace, and whenever his behaviour towards his own daughter starts to cross an incestuous line there's a palpable audience shudder. But the less caricatured performances around him are what keep The 47th from being completely dominated by either the actor or the shadow of the man he's playing; they provide real characters, and the consequences for them give the play its overall disconcerting feel.

The 47th by Mike Bartlett is booking until the 28th of May at the Old Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.