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

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.”

Churchill is a playwright of ideas who, throughout her long career, has played with structure. Her 2012 play Love and Information depicted the fragmentation of modern life through 57 scenes and more than 100 characters. With just three actors, this new play is a triumph of form and content: as short and direct as a press conference, its purpose is to alert us to a global crisis. This is the theatrical equivalent of a political sketch.

A story arc in one act, it is not a highbrow version of the 60- to 90-second schlocky microdrama episodes for mobile phones, which have become so popular that Channel 4 is launching its own series. Short plays go back to Suetonius’s time. Chekhov, Beckett and Albee were all masters of the dramatic sprint. Churchill started out writing short radio plays, and in later years her work has become an increasing feat of compression.

But this brevity goes against a trend for theatrical maximalism. To persuade audiences back to theatres and cinemas after the pandemic, plays and films have been getting longer, perhaps to justify the price of a ticket. The Oscar-winning movie The Brutalist required a 15-minute interval in 2024. A two-part RSC dramatisation of Middlemarch has just opened at Stratford, where an epic Game of Thrones ended last month. However, a reducio spell has been cast on the six-hour, two-part Harry Potter and the Cursed Child juggernaut, which has reopened at half its original length.

A play in your lunch break or after a night out is not practical for many. And while mini dramas make use of empty theatre hours and fit around evening performances, only a playwright of Churchill’s stature could guarantee a sellout, weeklong run for a show briefer than an interval without audiences feeling short-changed. Triumph could be seen as a curtain raiser for a revival of her 1979 classic Cloud 9 at the National Theatre next month, and Three and a Bit, a new collection of “biting short plays” at the Almeida in January.

The Guardian’s Michael Billington called Churchill “theatre’s great disruptor”. With Triumph she is disrupting the conventions of theatregoing itself: a play isn’t always something to be enjoyed between an early supper, interval drinks and the last train home. She has turned the attention economy on its head. Like a Covid-era emergency press conference, Triumph interrupts its audience’s day to make them listen. It jolts us out of our complacency.