You can’t accuse Mike Bartlett of running shy from genre. At the Old Vic, you can see his new play The 47th, which imagines the 2024 American presidential campaign by borrowing freely from Shakespearean blank verse, the same trick he used in King Charles III, his biggest success to date. His 2009 play Cock, currently playing at the Ambassadors, is a scabrous sexual comedy that nods to David Mamet. And now, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, comes Scandaltown, a boisterous new social satire in the pitiless style of Restoration comedy.
It’s a bold, potentially fruitful move: there’s something about that neglected genre’s unerring nose for hypocrisy that feels perfectly calibrated for the vapid moral posturing of our times. Bartlett certainly has fun aping Restoration’s pointed artifice – character names include Phoebe Virtue and Freddie Peripheral – while his script effortlessly whips together 17th-century formality with modern slang.
The plot, too, is purposefully ludicrous: Phoebe, who is indeed a squeaky clean Gen Zedder, heads to London disguised as a man, Twelfth Night-style, to find her brother Jack, whom she fears has succumbed to a life of vice and pleasure in the corrupt metropolis. At the same time, the vampy Lady Climber (Rachael Stirling, a riot) has hired a social media consultant to help her launch a political career at a moment so polarised that one outrageous move on Twitter can lead as easily to a TV contract as it can to cancellation. Their stories, and that of several other archetypes of the Left and the Right – an anti capitalist waitress; a Tory MP – meet and get thoroughly muddled up, both carnally and narratively, at a Netflix masked ball.
The general confusion feels emblematic of Bartlett’s main target: namely the hazy intellectual thinking behind much of the modern-day culture wars. Amid gags taking pot shots at virtual signalling, Partygate, Covid and cancel culture, his characters on both sides of the spectrum are united by having strong moral position on issues but at the same time very little grasp of what the arguments actually are. One neat joke encapsulates the tangle the Left has got itself into on the subject of women’s rights in particular – Lady Climber is warned that even saying she never wanted children is an offensive thought, without it being remotely clear to whom it is offensive.
The trouble is, the play seems as little interested in analysis as its characters. It all feels decidedly tired, like drinking champagne from a bottle that’s been open two days too long. The odd intriguing one liner, such as “I’m sick of feeling guilty”, hints at a thesis that is never developed. Instead, Bartlett largely settles for throwaway gags so beloved of panto. An awful lot of energy is devoted to groan-inducing euphemisms – a postman makes one very rubbish joke about packages and slots.
