David Burchhardt and Natasha Lanceley in Trump: The Musical at Waterloo East Theatre, London
Trump: The Musical at the Waterloo East Theatre, London.
Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩
It is 2020, and Donald Trump is still President and trolling the world on Twitter, Kim Jong-un is still trolling the world with missile launches – but in the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage has imprisoned the Royal Family and installed himself as King.
In Blowfish Theatre’s follow-up to Boris: The Musical, which they based around actual events, the shift to a more fantastic scenario lies at the root of all the show’s problems.
The firmest footing is to be found with the barbs at Trump himself. David Burchhardt’s characterisation is not the most accurate, nor the writing the most original, but there is such a large stream of character traits to mine that it makes for a well-rounded satirical performance.
Things start to fall apart when Trump makes a state visit to post-Brexit Britain, with King Nigel hatching a plan to refill the nation’s coppers by selling off Scotland to Trump to make the world’s largest golf course.
Director Kyle Williams plays London-born Farage as a profanity-laden Yorkshireman for some reason; the decision to make the character completely charmless may be accurate, but hardly makes for good comedy.
Far more successful are Natasha Lanceley’s characterisations of both Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.
Her Kim is a demented K-Pop instagram obsessive, determined to break the internet faster than that other Kim, Ms Kardashian, while her Putin is amusingly, if unbelievably, cast as a spurned lover as Trump turns his attention away from Russia and towards the UK.
These are possibly the two greatest characterisations in the whole piece, and it is regrettable that we cannot have both on stage at once. Certainly the show’s reworking of Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘Three Little Demagogues’, would be improved with Kim Jong-un participating instead of Farage.
A further subplot about an Illuminati-like organisation (named “Emily”, aka the MLE, the “metropolitan liberal elite”) that wants to force the UK to rejoin the EU falls particularly flat.
Indeed, the further away the show’s writing (by performer Laurence Peacock) gets from modern day reality, the easier it is for the show to lose its otherwise obvious ability to score satirical points.
Dominic Lo’s compositions (with lyrics by Peacock) are perhaps the strongest element of the show, replete with barbs about the current political climate.
And that’s perhaps the key problem here: the current state of US politics has become so bizarrely out of kilter with what we’ve come to consider political norms, that fantastical satire must work much harder to find the humour.
On the evidence of Trump: The Musical, Blowfish has not been able to accomplish this.
Scott Matthewman
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