14 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
she said. Other gigs: matchmaking,
digital marketing, fund-raising, investor
relations, event planning. In 2015, she
launched the Instagram handle @whats-
inababyname. Her advice videos have
been viewed more than 1.7 million times.
On TikTok, she responds to people
who post questions, mainly seeking help
finding complementary sibling names.
What’s a good boy name to go with Cal-
liope? “Oh, my God, Calliope is a baby
namer’s dream!” she says, in a video re-
sponse. Her suggestions: Florian, Bara-
bas, Roscoe, Stavros, and Balthazar.
Paying clients get more personalized
treatment. She recently suggested the
name Parks to a couple who told her that
they had had their first kiss in a town
called Parker and wanted something
avant-garde. A client who was Lebanese
and French reached out from the hos-
pital with an emergency request. She
would be raising her child in America
and needed a name that worked across
all three cultures. Humphrey quickly
e-mailed a list of fifty names. The client
chose her top recommendation: Chloe.
The mother of a three-month-old
named Isla called in a panic, contem-
plating a name change after people kept
pronouncing the silent “s.” Humphrey
advised her to stay the course; Isla is a
top-one-hundred name. Another com-
mon issue? Too many kids. “I have a lot
of families for whom this is their third
or fourth kid, and they’re, like, ‘We’re
out of names,’ ” she said.
To find names, she mines film cred-
its, observes street signs, and studies
trends. One good source is the Social
Security database, which reveals the
quick decline of disaster names (Ka-
trina, Isis) and names taken over by
brands. “I don’t think Delta is going to
be out for a long time,” she said. “Un-
like Siri and Alexa.”
She connects the popularity, ten years
ago, of four-letter names (Ruby, Luna,
Levi) with the rise of such instant-grat-
ification apps as Seamless and Tinder.
Now longer names are making a come-
back—the result, Humphrey believes, of
the lockdown-related return to leisurely
pursuits like gardening, cooking, and
crafting. Waiting for the sourdough to
rise has given people the patience to
enunciate multisyllable names like Gen-
evieve, Josephine, and Theodore.
On the phone, Humphrey and her
1
LONDONPOSTCARD
YOUHATEMEA
few years ago, the British play-
wright Mike Bartlett offered an
ingenious take on future events in “King
Charles III,” a drama that appeared in
the West End, and then on Broadway,
about the Royal Family in the imag-
ined wake of the death of Queen Eliz-
abeth. Startlingly, but somehow entirely
aptly, its characters spoke in blank verse:
“My life has been a ling’ring for the
throne,” Charles soliloquized in the first
scene. When the curtain rose last week
at London’s Old Vic on Bartlett’s new
play, “The 47th,” a very different head
of state was center stage, announcing
himself to the audience in iambic pen-
tameter: “I know, I know. You hate me.
So much, right?”
In “The 47th”—the title refers to
whoever will come after Joe Biden, the
forty-sixth President of the United
States—Bartlett again employs Shake-
speare’s idiom to fashion a contempo-
rary succession drama. “I’ve known for
a while that Trump was sort of a Shake-
spearean archetype, in the way that
Charles was,” Bartlett explained the
other day, during a break from rehearsal.
“Charles is the man who waited: he
waits his whole life to be king, and then
he’s only got a short period, so what’s
he going to do with it? And Trump, as
a sort of seductive, show-biz, bitter, iconic
figure, is also quite Shakespearean—
quite ‘Richard III.’ ” It was only after
the storming of the Capitol, in January,
2021, that Bartlett felt inspired, he said,
to give the former President the stage
from which he had been ushered in the
election of 2020, and to set the playclient were working through the list. A
pass on Stellan caused Humphrey to
pause. “Stellan is a great alternative to
Soren. I think of shooting stars,” she
said. “Maybe we shouldn’t rush past that
one. It means ‘peaceful and calm.’”
“It sounds a lot like Stalin,” the client
said. “I’m a huge World War Two buff.”
Humphrey dropped it and moved on.
—Laura Laneslightly in advance of the 2024 election.
“After that happened, I realized Amer-
ican democracy, as a project, is in jeop-
ardy,” Bartlett said. “So it’s not just about:
how does one defeat Trump? It’s: how
does one engage with that? ”
The cast is a mix of British and Amer-
ican actors: Trump is played by Bertie
Carvel, who won an Olivier Award for
his performance as Miss Trunchbull in
“Matilda” and a Tony for playing Ru-
pert Murdoch in “Ink”; Kamala Harris
is played by Tamara Tunie, who ap-
peared in more than two hundred epi-
sodes of “Law & Order,” as the medi-
cal examiner Dr. Melinda Warner. To
capture the forty-fifth President’s dis-
tinctive speech patterns, Bartlett watched
hours of rallies and debates—just kid-
ding! “I didn’t have to listen to any—
I’ve heard enough,” Bartlett said, grimly.
He salted his text with Trumpisms, es-
pecially in the early scenes. “It was so
beautiful, so many jobs,” Trump says
of the economy during his tenure. But,
Bartlett explained, “as the narrative
comes through, and the characters come
through, some of that drops away.”
Instead, “The 47th” playfully riffs on
Shakespearean rhythms and tropes. In a
“Lear”-like setup in the first act, Trump
discusses dividing his fortune among
his three older children: Don, Jr., who
models himself on his namesake (“I am
your mirror, father. Donald named/ And
Donald Trump in bloody nature, too”);
dopey Eric, “a sniv’ling wreck with lit-
tle sense,” as Eric himself puts it; and
cunning Ivanka. “Your rightful heir will
never beg, but trade” is Ivanka’s response
to her father’s entreaty for loyalty, be-
fore Trump declares that a three-way
split “feels not aligned/ With my phi-
losophy: to find the art/Within the deal.”
Elsewhere, Bartlett’s Trump makes
an appearance at a Republican rally, to
name Ted Cruz as his chosen succes-
sor; when he starts referring to Cruz
as “an honorable man,” viewers famil-
iar with “Julius Caesar” will have some
hint of the direction things are headed.
“The rule for me is that if you know
the Shakespeare references it’s an added
bonus, but if you don’t know them it
doesn’t matter,” explained Bartlett, who
is forty-one and was born in the wan-
ing months of the tenure of the thir-
ty-ninth President, Jimmy Carter. He
went on, “I’ve just stolen some good