8 Tuesday April 5 2022 | the times
arts
it’s really about is empathy and
understanding what might be
happening in somebody else’s head,
or in their emotions and their lives.
Everybody’s got a thing. Everybody’s
going through something.”
And yet Restoration farce is cruel.
“Yes, those plays didn’t really have a
heart.” That’s not surprising, after five
years of puritanism. “Exactly, and I get
that, but it’s interesting that even in
the read-through of this play, the
amorality is sort of fine in the first
half, but then as an audience you
crave something a little bit more
three-dimensional for the characters.”
Both of Bartlett’s new comedies
are shot through with unexpected
forewarnings of mortality. A scythe-
wielding Death is a guest at the
masked ball in Scandaltown. Trump
contemplates his posthumous legacy
in The 47th. Bartlett thinks the theme
may recur partly because he has
turned 40. When I mention that he
and his contemporaries Jack Thorne
and James Graham now light up
theatre front of houses in the way
Stoppard, Pinter and Hare did 30
years ago, he replies that he is
already looking over his shoulder at
the next generation of writers. “[John]
Osborne wrote his best play at 26.”
Anticipating my next question
about the relative absence of female
playwrights, Bartlett adds to my list of
contemporary giants: Lucy Prebble,
Lucy Kirkwood and Debbie Tucker
Green. “I’ve always felt that a weird
thing about hierarchy in theatre is that
a play’s impact is not actually related
to the size of the theatre. Sarah Kane’s
Blasted was staged in the Theatre
Upstairs at the Royal Court. Very few
people saw it but the impact of that
play is vast. One of the things I love
about theatre is actually a tiny show
like Fleabag, which was in Edinburgh
originally. If you hit upon an idea or
a character, then like a meme it can
grow and have a huge impact.”
His next project will, he hopes, be
for television, although he cannot
tell me what it is. In the meantime,
although he has no ideas for a third
series, Doctor Foster, that marital-
revenge drama, lives on in remakes
in a dozen countries.
“I trace it back to doing a version of
Medea in the Watford Palace Theatre.
And I suppose that’s the other thing
with both these [new] plays. We think
we’ve come so far. We think we’re so
impressive. Yet you take a play from
300, 400 years ago and you apply it to
now, and look how well it fits. There’s
something that speaks to you about
human nature and power and the fact
that despite all our technology and
our modernity we’re still primal.”
In calling The 47th and Scandaltown
plays of ideas, I realise I have done
them an injustice. They are that, but
even more they are passion plays, and
very funny ones too.about conditional, deal-making love.”
The succession question — will
Donald Jr, Eric or Ivanka inherit the
empire? — brings with it echoes of
King Lear. I spotted textual references
also to Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard II,
Richard III and Julius Caesar. “The
rule for me,” Bartlett says, “is always:
you don’t have to get them. In fact in
many ways, if the audience doesn’t get
them and thinks that I’ve invented
those lines, that’s better, because then
I look cleverer.”
Scandaltown at the Lyric is also a
play for today told in a theatrical
idiom of the past. In its case, the war
between the woke and the unwoke
raging in the 21st century is given the
tropes — audience asides, characters
in disguise, sexual innuendo — and
hectic pace of a Restoration comedy.
“I had the idea of writing it on the
press night of Love, Love, Love [a Lyric
Hammersmith revival of his 2010
play]. I was watching it in this
beautiful theatre, but it was three days
before the theatres shut down and we
sort of knew they were going to shut
down. I just suddenly thought, ‘This
fits so well.’ You’ve got the idea of theMike Bartlett has three plays on in London — and one
of them is a US election satire, he tells Andrew Billen
S
hakespeare, pretty much
always. Andrew Lloyd
Webber, as recently as- Agatha Christie, the
only woman to have done
so (in 1954). Nonetheless,
it is rare for a playwright
to have three (or more)
plays running simultaneously in
London. This month Mike Bartlett,
41, the writer of the TV show Doctor
Foster, joins the pantheon when two
new works by him arrive in town to
join the revival of his 2009 play Cock.
Bartlett says he feels “humble” and
“lucky” and that it’s “amazing”. What
is more amazing, perhaps, is that
these two new plays read like classics:
topical, hilarious, but constructed
around ideas that will endure.
He has spent this morning watching
rehearsals of Scandaltown at the Lyric
Hammersmith. I want first, however,
to talk over Zoom about The 47th,
which is on at the Old Vic. It is a satire
on the next US presidential election
between Kamala Harris (Tamara
Tunie) and a lethal Donald Trump,
played by Bertie Carvel, Suranne
Jones’s husband in Doctor Foster.
“The thing about Trump that we
identified was that he needs stage
danger. We need to go to that theatre
and be a bit terrified of the actor
playing him,” Bartlett says. “And
Bertie is your man for that. On stage,
and certainly in the rehearsal room,
he’s completely terrifying.”
At first, he did not want to feed
Trump the “oxygen of publicity” by
writing about him, but the assault on
the Capitol two years ago took the
story on. “It ran deeper than just
Donald Trump becoming president.
It was about a threat to American
democracy and about division.”
Suddenly the question of whether
Trump might return handed Bartlett
a plot. A conceit from his King Charles
III in 2014, in which Tim Pigott-Smith
spoke our future king’s lines in blank
verse, gave him its form.
“I sort of knew that Trump was a
Shakespearean archetype, a bit like
Charles was the man who waited and
then was only king for a short period
at the end of his life. Trump is the
entertainer turned president.”
Somehow Bartlett managed to
fold Trump’s idiot idiolect into
Shakespearean iambic. “He has
distinctive rhythms: ‘Beautiful, so
beautiful.’ I think it’s about finding
enough of those that you recognise
it’s him but then expand him a bit and
give him perhaps a greater vocabulary.
He’s a great improviser. It’s one of the
things he loves the most. Once he’s
got a stage, he’ll stand there and talk
and talk and talk and try and get
laughs and if he feels the crowd is
waning, he’ll say something to get their
attention — which led to many of the
unexpected policy announcements
during his presidency.”
The danger, I say, is that the verse
can turn the demagoguery into
something, beautiful, so beautiful. “I
mean, it really is. And the danger of
writing a play is that you indulge in it.”
Poetic or not, his Trump seems to
me a personification of the American
id. “One of the things that I found
linked America and American-
western capitalism and then Donald
Trump as a person and as a father is
the idea of the deal. Everything he
does is a deal. So part of the play is
going, ‘Well, that must be therefore
how he treats his children, and how
he was treated, maybe, by his father.’
It’s not about unconditional love. It’s
The 47th is at the Old
Vic, SE1 to May 28.
Scandaltown is at the
Lyric Hammersmith,
W6, April 7-May 14mask or the avatar and the question of
what’s behind it. You’ve got puritanism
and a new puritanism. What does that
mean? And you’ve also got the fact
that the theatres are all going to be
closed for a good chunk of time and
at some point we’re going to want to
come back and have a laugh.”
The farce caricatures every side of
the woke debate, mocks several social,
regional and media classes and revels
in undoings by sexual misadventure.
A composite Tory MP is part Boris
Johnson, part Matt Hancock and part
Michael Gove (a line about a night in
Aberdeen should get a big laugh). And
yet, I say, Scandaltown seems to follow
in the path of two recent Bartlett
plays, Snowflake and Mrs Delgado,
both of which first appeared at the
Old Fire Station in Oxford (Bartlett
was brought up, privately schooled
and lives with his wife and children
in Oxfordshire). Each in its own way
deals with the cultural gap between
generations intolerant of each other’s
values. Each too finally forges a bridge
out of kindness.
“I think that’s true. I mean, kindness
has become a bit of a cliché but whatI turned Trump’s
idiot idiolect into
iambic verse
Mike Bartlett; below:
Suranne Jones as
Gemma Foster in
Doctor FosterTim Pigott-Smith as King Charles
III at Wyndham’s TheatreTOM JAMIESON/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE; LNP/REX SHUTTERSTOCK