If you want to satirise a power figure or a political movement, you automatically reach for Shakespeare. Theatrical history is littered with examples. In 1937, Orson Welles staged a modern-dress Julius Caesar that evoked the worlds of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In 1941, Bertolt Brecht used Richard III as a template for his anti-Hitlerian The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. In 1966, Barbara Garson’s MacBird! daringly suggested that Lyndon Johnson was a modern Macbeth implicated in the death of JFK. So it is hardly surprising that writers and directors turn to the Bard in depicting Donald Trump.
The current example is Mike Bartlett’s The 47th at the Old Vic, which uses King Lear, Julius Caesar and Richards II and III to try and nail the Trump phenomenon: although highly ingenious, it is hardly likely to cause controversy. The opposite was the case when, in 2017, the New York Public Theater’s annual summer Shakespeare in the Park production was a Julius Caesar in which the tyrant was a blond-quiffed figure with a Slovenian-accented wife: a conspirator even argued that the Romans loved him so much that they would forgive him “if Caesar had stabbed their mothers on Fifth Avenue”. Such was the uproar over the assassination of the Trump-like Caesar that two of the Public Theater’s sponsors pulled their support. That production features prominently in a book by Jeffrey R Wilson unequivocally entitled Shakespeare and Trump.
