The 47th, Old Vic, review: Bertie Carvel’s perfect Trump impression can’t save this superficial play

Rory Bremner does a wicked Donald Trump impression, but he has nothing on Bertie Carvel. The chameleonic 44-year-old British actor, who stole the show as Miss Trunchball in the original production of Matilda, incarnates the man who was America’s 45th president in Mike Bartlett’s satirical new play with such winning meticulousness, you’d swear the real McCoy had landed in SE1.

You could watch Carvel having a ball as Trump for hours. Which is just as well because the great bogeyman of recent US politics hogs the limelight for much of the near-future action, set at the tail-end of Biden’s first term, in 2024.

The initial sight of the main attraction alone induces gasps of recognition and knowing chuckles. Wheeling into view in a golf-buggy, the jowly profile and tufty, badly coiffed yellowish hair spot-on, Carvel’s Donald disembarks by a golf-course hole and takes a putt at a ball, his rump to the audience – indulging in a mindless scratch too. It’s a tragicomic sight; largo desolato in Mar-a-Lago.

When he turns to speak, or squeak, grandiosely, with erratic emphasis and sardonic underlining, it’s clear the star has him to a tee: that fussy and fey way with the fingers and motioning hands, the hunched jerkiness, the restless, tilting head, the narrow squinting. In Bartlett’s spin, Trump may be deposed, but he’s unbowed, and instantly incendiary: “The white men in the audience, you know/ just how it feels when you are told… You’re racist! Blam! Forget a judge/ The proof of guilt’s the pallor of your skin…”

There’s an inadvertent irony in that opening salvo; it was reportedly comments about identity politics that saw Terry Gilliam’s production of Into the Woods – originally intended for this slot – ousted by internal dissent. Bartlett has again crafted cod-Shakespearean blank verse to create a mock epic discourse, as with his garlanded “future history play” King Charles III at the Almeida (then West End). The object of the exercise here, of course, is to show how unsavoury Trump’s thinking is. Exhorted to run again for the White House, America’s great disruptor reboots in a more fascistic form – whipping up his supporters, stoking unrest and unveiling a new slogan: America Rules!

The script pays lip-service, but only that, to the idea that Trump offers a repository for the hopes of America’s dispossessed. There’s no proper interacting with the populus; they’re addressed in a TV debate, and Bartlett, again teaming with Almeida artistic director Rupert Goold, paints them in the primary colours of unruly mobbishness: a shamanic male – much like the accidental figurehead of the 2021 US Capitol attack – dominates turbulent, physicalised vignettes.

The drama begins with a demand for expressions of filial devotion straight out of King Lear – Melania isn’t present, or named – albeit the Cordelia-like Ivanka (a studiedly composed, stiletto-sharp Lydia Wilson) impresses her dad by refusing to play ball. There are so many ensuing Shakespearean references the piece almost resembles an extended sophomore skit. The florid style is a loose fit for Trumpian rhetoric but where intertextuality got us inside the cares of monarchy in King Charles III, less light is shed on the state of the American body politic. So Simon Williams’s Biden goes doolally and turns sleep-walker, like Lady Macbeth; so what? The soliloquies often sound like ornate padding.

With the plotting taking a turn for the preposterous, the title I was most reminded of was Much Ado About Nothing. Bartlett alludes to the impact of the pandemic, but broadly his conjecture isn’t much bothered with contextual specifics. Flashes of wit aside, it feels like an outsider’s perspective, and one-sided too. Tamara Tunie’s Kamala Harris has a gravitas that feels unearned. The women, inevitably, resist unabashed misogyny. Goold brings his usual sheen to proceedings, played out under an oval-ish strip of light, yet can’t hide the lack of meaningful substance beneath the theatrical polish. See it for Carvel’s tour de force, perhaps, but as Trump would attest, you can’t win ’em all.

Until May 28. Tickets: 0344 871 7628; oldvictheatre.com