Review: TRUMPAGEDDON, King's Head Theatre, 8 November 2016

Shrivelled though it is, one can assume that Donald Trump possesses a superego, some check on his atavistic bullying, deception and misogyny. Strip even that wafer-thin layer of decency away and you get Simon Jay's blond quiff, suspiciously white powdered lapels and grotesquely rouged face - a caricature of a caricature.

His successful Edinburgh show came to London on US Election Night to take questions from an audience sprinkled with Americans and to exaggerate (if only a little) the tropes that have become familiar over the last few months - the leering and lechery directed to women, "Crooked Hilary", immigrant bating, the whole freakshow.

It's a bit on the politically incorrect side (how could it be otherwise?) but there's a pantomime villain dimension to the portrayal which, if truth be told, shades more into Boris Johnson during his bumbling lovable rogue stage than Trump. Jay himself is everything Trump isn't (one of his motivations for developing the show) and that comes across rather too often. What someone with a genuinely vicious streak (say Jerry Sadowitz) would do with the format would be interesting if scary. As it is, despite some zingers, Jay's tone is never fully established and the focus too often wanders.

At one point in the show, an accomplice monitoring the "results" as they came in, announced that Ohio had gone for Trump and a wholly unfeigned wave of shock rippled round the house (me included, as it was a late show and I wasn't certain of when early states would declare). But it was only a cupcake competition at a Midwest bakery! We settled down, queasy smiles on faces as heart rates dropped again.

But the cupcake baker was right.

Trumpageddon returns to the King's Head Theatre on 14 November.

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