Rachael Stirling in Scandaltown
(Picture: Marc Brenner)Mike Bartlett’s dramas vary wildly in style but also in quality: the elegant, deeply thoughtful works are balanced by sketchier ones. This contemporary Restoration comedy, starring Bartlett’s sometime-muse Rachael Stirling as a modern social (media) climber, is one of the latter.
It’s laugh-out-loud funny at times but its discussions of freedom, liberty and responsibility – not to mention some last-minute gags about partygate - are schematic. It feels like Bartlett - whose blank verse drama The 47th, about a Trump run in 2024, opened at the Old Vic last week - wrote it to prove he could once again do something that no one else is doing.
