This Trump satire is too soft on Sleepy Joe and Cackling Kamala: The 47th at the Old Vic reviewed

Trump is said to be a gift for bad satirists and a problem for good ones. He dominates Mike Bartlett’s new play, The 47th, which predicts that the 2024 presidential election will be a run-off between Trump and Kamala Harris. Bertie Carvel’s Orangeman is a subtle and highly amusing spoof that never descends into exaggeration or grotesquery. The visuals are convincing: the sandy blond wig, the baggy golfing outfits, the spare tyre around the midriff. Excellent design work. And Bartlett captures the repetitive lullaby pulse of Trump’s rhetoric. Like a lot of liberals, he seems to admire Trump and this show reflects a perverse fascination with its target.

The script is understandably soft on Sleepy Joe and his faltering brainpower. Simon Williams generously plays him as an articulate and principled elder statesman. If only! We’re asked to believe that Biden remains on close terms with Harris and that their friendship has survived her accusations of racism made during the debates in 2019.

The portrayal of Harris (Tamara Tunie) is the show’s central absurdity. ‘Cackling Kamala’ comes across as a super-smart political heavyweight who could easily sweep Trump aside in a head-to-head. So what happened to the real Harris, the dim-witted irrelevance, the international joke, the simpering lightweight who giggles during press conferences and makes banality-crammed speeches that seem to be aimed at pre-schoolers? In fact, Harris has little chance of running in 2024, either as vice-president or for the top job, because schemers in the White House are plotting her ruin, and even in her home state of California her approval ratings are in free fall. It’s a shame that this promising play is so detached from its subject-matter but the creative team have decided to write about US politics without reading about it.