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Getting to Know Mike Bartlett

Author Lillian Scott-Clash

Published 15/03/2022

As Mike Bartlett’s new play, The 47th, begins at The Old Vic this month, we take a look at the writer’s illustrious career so far, and where you might have seen his work before…

He's a multi award-winning playwright

The 47th reunites Mike Bartlett with Director Rupert Goold. The pair worked together on the multi award-winning King Charles III which transferred to the West End from the Almeida Theatre in 2014, followed by a run on Broadway and in Australia. The play went on to win the Olivier Award for Best New Play – and you might have also seen the television adaptation on BBC Two.

Bertie Carvel, Tamara Tunie and Lydia Wilson in rehearsals for The 47th

He's got plenty of work to go back and explore

Since the staging of his play The Love at Last at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2002, Bartlett has had 24 plays staged in theatres across the UK. If you haven’t caught one yet though, you might know his work instead from television series like Doctor Foster (starring Bertie Carvel, who plays Donald Trump in The 47th), Life, Trauma, Unfaithful and Press.

The 47th is set in 2024 as America goes to the polls and the world waits to see who will be next to enter the White House.

The 47th is darkly funny – and written in 'Shakespearean' blank verse

The 47th is set in 2024 as America goes to the polls and the world waits to see who will be next to enter the White House. It’s written in blank verse – poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, usually written in iambic pentameter*. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are written in blank verse, and Mike Bartlett spoke to The Guardian about why he felt it was the perfect form for a play about the next presidential race.

*Iambic pentameter is a line of writing that consists of ten syllables in a specific pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, or a short syllable followed by a long syllable.

Like in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

– or in Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off

I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, sha-ake

The 47th will have its world premiere performance on The Old Vic stage on 29 Mar, and will play until 28 May.

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