Triumph review: Caryl Churchill's short, caustic White House satire

At 88, Caryl Churchill is arguably Britain’s greatest living playwright and it seems she may also be an agent of Transatlantic political change. Hours after the opening of her 20-minute satire, Triumph, about a blonde American press secretary realising she can no longer celebrate the indefensible, Katie Zacharia quit the White House. A further collection of “biting short plays” from Churchill will open Dominic Cooke’s tenure at the Almeida in January, it was revealed this week. Go on, Caryl, do Trump and Musk now.

Even if that announcement slightly diminished the cachet of Triumph, a new Churchill play remains an event. With its brief running time, its week-long run and its roots in Suetonius’s sensationalist biographies of Rome’s leaders in The Twelve Caesars, this slender work will have a self-selecting audience. Its multiple daily performances are already pretty much sold out so there’s little need for me to preach to the unconverted.

Like all of Churchill’s most recent works, it is a bright miniature with a crystalline single idea, straightforward in its message. It contains little of the metaphysical hijinks, formal experimentation or character depth of her great earlier plays. The passages describing the attitudes and acts of “the emperor” apparently come directly from Suetonius. I confess it’s not a work I’m familiar with, but Churchill isn’t the first person to draw parallels between the orange president and Nero, Caligula or Claudius.

In another example of felicitous timing, this production by her trusted director James Macdonald stars the great Kate O’Flynn, fresh off her Emmy win for Widow’s Bay. We first see her character Iris kissing a man called Marcus (Matthew Beard). Their instant attraction is not true love, they realise, but recognition delayed by the fact Iris doesn’t have her long, yellow wig on.

Kate O’Flynn in Triumph

Marc Brenne

She, in turn, knows Marcus indistinctly from the “back of the room” – he is a distant reporter in the press pack. There’s a lectern to one side of the stage, a bed on the other, and a TV in between. We see Iris at or on all three, lit by burning firepits, reporting examples of imperial vanity and horrendous brutality, while reassuring us she supports the emperor “101 per cent!”

When Marcus tells her that her boss has people sawn in half, virgins raped, and makes people fight to the death for his amusement, her glutinous girlish cheerleading starts to ebb. At this point it may be legally prudent if I state that Donald Trump has done none of these things.

In myth, Iris was the servant and messenger of the gods: Marcus meanwhile may be so named to associate him with Marcus Aurelius, the stoic philosopher and “last of the good emperors”, or with the statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. It’d be a mistake though to look too literally into classical roots for the characters: there’s also a sinister, Stephen Miller-style factotum played by Sargon Yelda whose name, Rufus, seems to have no significance.

The events Iris reels off don’t directly correlate to Trump but a lot of them sound like the stuff he might do if he’d been in charge of the late Roman Republic and the early Empire. Have his statue carried around religious festivals? Have galleons line up so he can ride his chariot across the surface of the sea? Name a month after himself? Yep, yep, yep.

Iris’s boss regards himself as divinely all-powerful, better than a king. The most chilling line is that the emperor, when kissing his wife “or any other woman”, murmurs: “This beautiful neck will be cut whenever I please.” (Again, I am categorically not suggesting that any American president has ever done this.)

Beard’s role is vestigial, a mere trigger for Iris’s conscience: Yelda’s Rufus is just there to remind us that, in the attention economy, outrage can be an end in itself. Within the limited arc of her character, O’Flynn is excellent, her bright-eyed zeal swiftly hollowed out. Iris’s fate may be worse than death, but Churchill’s slim, succinct late work reminds us that Rome eventually fell.