The words of Mike Bartlett loom tall over London’s theatres. But, with Scandaltown – the playwright’s third show opening in less than two months, his supremacy has begun to teeter.
It’s a modern twist on a Restoration play, written for a post-lockdown era, so you’d expect it to be a witty interrogation of all things 2022. There’s a receding hair-lined secretary of state, Matt Eaton (Richard Goulding), who is uncannily like our own Boris Johnson and has haphazardly led the country through “the plague”. “Snowflakes” and “softness” are the insults of choice. There are mentions of Instagram pictures posted in “solidarity” with the Black Lives Matter movement. But beyond packing as many contemporary cultural references into his script as possible, Bartlett’s satire about the rich and powerful is underachieving.
