The Guardian view on Caryl Churchill’s Triumph: a play for today | Editorial

At barely 20 minutes, this satire on strongman politics serves to jolt audiences out of their complacency

“Is this theatre for the TikTok generation?” one critic asked of the latest play by 88-year-old Caryl Churchill, lauded as Britain’s greatest living playwright. Triumph, her blistering satire on contemporary strongman politics, is barely 20 minutes long.

Cleverly spliced with Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars, the play takes the form of a press conference given by a blond-wigged apparatchik, who smilingly extols the barbarities of an unnamed narcissistic emperor. If “Triumph” were a crossword answer, the clue might be “To greet a populist US leader in confusion – a win (7)”. Even given Churchill’s reputation for prescience, the play was uncannily timely. It premiered in London and New York on the same day that President Trump’s short-lived press officer Katie Zacharia was forced to resign. As the American comedian Robin Williams quipped of an earlier administration, “People say satire is dead. It’s not dead; it’s alive and living in the White House.”