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      Trump and Moses: American Power Brokers on London Stages

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      In new works by English playwrights, the 45th U.S. president plots to become the 47th, and the New York urban planner Robert Moses loses his mind.LONDON — Donald J. Trump won’t surrender the spotlight easily. But few could have guessed that he would find renewed life on the London stage, where Mike Bartlett’s scattershot satire, “The 47th,” opened last week at the Old Vic and will run through May 28.Why the number 47? Because the play takes off from America’s 45th president angling anew for top office in 2024. His appetite for attention remains undimmed, as does a fondness for golf. Bertie Carvel, whose portrayal of Trump is the play’s banner achievement, is first seen chugging into view on a golf cart: an impressive entrance that starts the play on a high.Dismounting to launch into a lengthy soliloquy bemoaning “four years of lonely exile,” the character before us looks and sounds uncannily like the man himself. Embodying a public figure 30 years his senior, Carvel — clearly padded — captures Trump’s outsize swagger and bullishness, alongside his ever-busy hands and that strangely fey voice. The tilted head and near-constant squint are perfectly caught, too.But those expecting the sort of “Saturday Night Live”-style broadside familiar from Alec Baldwin are in for a surprise. Within minutes, the audience is aware of a character, not a caricature, and one with a lot on his mind. The opening monologue depicts a vengeful figure acutely aware of how he is regarded: “I know, I know, you hate me,” this Trump remarks at the start.Promising “plans and plots aplenty,” Trump comes across as a Richard III for our time in a blank verse play that tosses out Shakespearean allusions like confetti. Seething with resentment but mindful of his dynasty, Trump gathers his three eldest children to search, like Lear, for an heir to a political kingdom he won’t lose without a fight.The play, to its credit, views Trump in three dimensions, and grants him a way with words you certainly wouldn’t expect from those lips in real life. “It’s not like you to coyly act the mute,” he tells Ivanka (a sleekly coiffed Lydia Wilson), a Cordelia equivalent reluctant — as in “King Lear” — to voice the affection that her father should already know. And I laughed out loud at this Trump’s dismissal of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” as too long — as if he would have opinions about a 16th-century political treatise.Joss Carter as the Shaman and Lydia Wilson as Ivanka Trump in “The 47th.”Marc BrennerWhen Carvel is center stage, “The 47th” entirely grips. The problem comes with a rambling, shapeless narrative that soon loses its way. It’s as if Bartlett were so busy trying to cover all bases that he leaves too many untended. (He’s certainly busy, with three plays running simultaneously in London.)The family drama, for instance, soon gives way to a portrait of an increasingly turbulent America whose anger has only intensified since the storming of the Capitol last year. Bartlett concocts a new slogan — “America rules” — that is emblazoned on banners spilling from the upper reaches of the theater to put us in a rallying state of mind. Miriam Buether’s set is itself quite plain: a blank canvas for a bellicose electorate.The imagined 2024 presidential race finds a sleepwalking, ailing Biden (a raspy-voiced Simon Williams) ceding center stage to Kamala Harris (the American actress Tamara Tunie), whom Trump duly treats with contempt. “You’re an ugly person,” he tells her. “I’m sorry but you are.” In fact, Tunie is so immediately classy and capable a presence that you wish she were given more to do.As well as characters we all know already, Bartlett presents some new ones, including Rosie (Ami Tredrea), a Republican, who derides her brother Charlie (James Cooney), a Democratic journalist, as “desperate and corrupt.” Rupert Goold’s production elsewhere brings on a QAnon-style Shaman (a furious Joss Carter) as a reminder of the darker forces that threaten democracy. Thrashing about in fury, he signifies a gathering anarchy that is also summoned by Ash J. Woodward’s video projections depicting mob misrule.Reuniting the team behind another play that peered into the immediate future, Bartlett’s “King Charles III,” this latest exercise in prophesy sags whenever Trump leaves the stage. His energy — however malign — is the motor that keeps it going, and Carvel certainly has my vote.Trump requires little introduction. But that might not be the case with Robert Moses, the Yale- and Oxford-educated urban planner and designer who died in 1981, age 92. His story famously informed the vast 1974 biography “The Power Broker,” by Robert Caro, and has now spawned a more streamlined play, “Straight Line Crazy.” Written by the English playwright David Hare, this exposition-heavy drama brings Ralph Fiennes roaring back to the stage as Moses and is running at the Bridge Theater through June 18.Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses in David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanAnyone who has made use of the highways and bridges in the greater New York area has probably traveled a route made possible by Moses, a hugely renowned figure in his day. A visionary who overflowed with ideas about how to reshape public spaces and the ways people obtain access to them, Moses attracted criticism as well. Although he didn’t drive himself, he was hostile to public transportation, not to mention casually racist and heedless of the communities displaced by the realization of his grand schemes. (One highway included bridges with deliberately inadequate clearance, so buses couldn’t use them.)Hare chooses two decisive points in Moses’ life to tell a story of vaulting ambition that devolves into the madness hinted at in the play’s title: 1926, as Moses, not far from 40, proposes building two parkways to link New York City to Long Island, and, after the intermission, 1955. The idea then was to build a sunken expressway that would cut through Lower Manhattan’s Washington Square Park.Fiennes has enough barrel-chested authority to sustain interest in what might otherwise seem arcane. You almost wish that the play, and Nicholas Hytner’s adroit production, were longer and amplified the material more. Moses’ nemesis, the urban space activist Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger, struggling with the accent), gets a crucial speech at the top of the play, but this self-described warrior isn’t shown putting up much of a fight.The other characters — various employees of Moses included — largely pale next to the momentum that builds as Moses starts to break down. “I’d rather be right, and alone, than soft, and with other people,” he admits toward the end, showing the Trump-like megalomania that brings a piecemeal play to hurtling, powerfully acted life.The 47th. Directed by Rupert Goold. Old Vic, through May 28.Straight Line Crazy. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through June 18. More

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      In ‘Bach & Sons,’ a Composer Stares Down Death

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      The new play at the Bridge Theater in London and two other productions on the city’s stages examine characters facing the end.LONDON — Few actors could stare down mortality better than Simon Russell Beale in “Bach & Sons,” a problematic new play at the Bridge Theater that benefits from a piercing central performance. Telling of the often testy relationship between the composer Johann Sebastian Bach and two of his 20 children, both sons who were musicians as well, the writer Nina Raine has come up with a research-heavy play that could be described as “Amadeus” lite. Like that play, Peter Shaffer’s celebrated take on Mozart, “Bach & Sons” features extended discussions of the nature of mediocrity, and also leans toward the scatological. Amid an expletive-heavy script, one character makes a passing reference to “a turd in the tureen.”Nicholas Hytner’s production boasts an evocative design from Vicki Mortimer, with cascading keyboards hanging above the stage; as in “Amadeus,” the dialogue often cuts off to make way for excerpts from the composer’s output. Beale with Racheal Ofori as Anna Magdalena Wilcke in another scene from “Bach & Sons.” Manuel HarlanOver time, Bach Sr. loses his sight and cedes ground to his son Carl (a vivid Samuel Blenkin), whom the father derides as musically “efficient” — a decided slight from a visionary who likes his art messier and more inspiring. Yet all Carl wants is simply to be loved. (Another son, Wilhelm, is played by Douggie McMeekin as an artistic prodigy doomed to failure.)The family chat consists largely of extolling the power of music, when you can’t help but feel that, really, they would have gotten on with making it. A climactic discourse on dissonance reminded me of Georges Seurat’s quest for harmony in the musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” to cite a more moving depiction of the creative process than “Bach & Sons,” with its boilerplate pronouncements about the value of art. Even so, Beale commands attention as the aging and worn Bach fades away. The composer’s canon, we’re told, can be characterized as a meditation on “the variety of grief,” and Beale communicates a man who has lived that grief himself: The actor cuts against the sentimentality of the writing to catch directly at the heart. “You can’t go on living and living and living,” says a character at the start of Nick Payne’s “Constellations” — and so it’s not altogether surprising when this 70-minute play turns toward confronting death in its second half.Payne’s one-act two-hander was first seen at the Royal Court in 2012 before transferring to the West End and then Broadway. The elegant staging from the director Michael Longhurst is now being revived at the Vaudeville Theater through Sept. 12, with the designer Tom Scutt’s buoyant cloudscape of balloons intact.Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker in Nick Payne‘s “Constellations,” directed by Michael Longhurst at the Vaudeville Theater.Marc BrennerThis time, there are four casts rotating across the run, and London theatergoers have so far had the opportunity to see two of them. (Among those still to come is a gay coupling that will feature the TV and stage name Russell Tovey.) The changing players reveal wildly contrasting takes on a tricky if accessible text in which events, large and small, are replayed with different outcomes, in accordance with Payne’s interest in the existence of a “multiverse.” That notion of alternate worlds coexisting alongside ours fuels a play that explores the infinite variability of life’s every moment, except the final one, which is always death.Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker, the oldest duo of the four, are also the more actorly of the two seen so far: You feel Wanamaker, especially, standing outside her character, Marianne, a Cambridge brainiac who holds forth on quantum mechanics and string theory. The parts don’t feel like a natural fit for either performer, though Capaldi, a onetime Doctor Who on TV, compensates with an abundance of charm. A much younger company brings together Sheila Atim (who won an Olivier for her role in “Girl From the North Country”) and Ivanno Jeremiah, who have a visceral connection onstage. Jeremiah is immediately likable as Roland, a beekeeper who meets Marianne at a barbecue and engages with her in a strange conversation about licking your elbow — to be honest, such exchanges work much better with the younger cast. Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah in “Constellations.”Marc BrennerAnd when Marianne confronts her possibly foreshortened life, the astonishing Atim communicates the gravitas of the situation even as Payne’s play makes clear that her fate can be rewritten with a happier ending in a parallel universe. These two are so good that, on a fourth viewing of the play, I felt as if I were seeing “Constellations” afresh: Atim and Jeremiah replay familiar material so it seems new — a virtue in a play that makes so much of repetition.If “Constellations” is late in raising the specter that its leading woman will die too soon, we know from the start that this is what will happen to the heroine of “Last Easter,” the 2004 play by Bryony Lavery at the intimate Orange Tree Theater through Aug. 7. (The show will be livestreamed on the theater’s website on July 22 and 23.) The director Tinuke Craig’s nimble production finds surprising levels of comedy in this story of June (the excellent Naana Agyei-Ampadu), a lighting designer with terminal cancer who goes on a pilgrimage with three friends to Lourdes, France, because — well, why not? Maybe a miracle will happen.June, it seems, is especially fond of the painter Caravaggio, and the first act veers away from anything maudlin toward lessons in art history one minute, a jaunty snatch or two from the song “Easter Parade” the next. The tone is unexpectedly breezy, and the camaraderie between June and her pals, also theater practitioners, is nicely done. These friendships keep June’s spirits buoyant, even as her body starts to let her down.From left, Naana Agyei-Ampadu, Jodie Jacobs and Peter Caulfield in Bryony Lavery’s “Last Easter,” directed by Tinuke Craig at the Orange Tree Theater.Helen MurrayYet after the intermission, as June’s condition worsens, the writing turns more self-conscious. June’s devoted buddy Gash (Peter Caulfield) twice calls out “cliché alert,” and several events are described as “undramatic,” an unusual choice of adjective for a dramatist. (The quartet also includes the character of a heavy-drinking actress who soon wears out her welcome, both as written and performed.)The imminence of death seems to defy this gifted writer, who goes for the sort of deathbed scene that has been seen onstage and in movies many times over. Whatever the reason for “Last Easter’s” prosaic closing scenes, they share with “Constellations” a sense that mortality comes best in good company.Bach & Sons. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Sept. 11.Constellations. Directed by Michael Longhurst. Vaudeville Theater, through Sept. 12.Last Easter. Directed by Tinuke Craig. Orange Tree Theater, through Aug. 7. More