Immediately after I’d landed in London, a worldwide computer outage caused mayhem at airports. Just before my return to Menton, there was a co-ordinated sabotage attack on the French rail network. Travel, what a minefield. There’s always the question, when will the luck run out?
At London’s Globe Theatre, the run of excellent plays ran out. The staging of The Taming of the Shrew was an exercise in sabotage. It was one of those productions where the director should have spent two minutes listening to the cool ideas brainstormed by Props and Wardrobe before shutting them down.
Every scene was dominated by Sesame Street-style costumes. The shrew’s father wore enormous yellow rubber feet and the shrew herself trudged on stage in a furry shrew costume, with tail. It was supposed to be absurdist, which meant it was meaningless without having to explain itself, and it was as subtle as a pair of giant rubber feet.
The Globe’s Richard III, on the other hand, was a rollicking rendition with Donald Trump references. Evil Richard made a white supremacist hand signal, and mentioned that “when you’re a star, they let you do it”. At one point, his men marched in red MAGA caps. It was all amusing and it worked, in a slightly pantomime way. The action veered between laughs and violent menace.
Meanwhile, all were riveted to the great play of the world. We now await a mighty showdown. Will the wicked pretender triumph? Will the shrew be tamed? Trump has dodged prosecutors and a bullet, but can his extraordinary luck run out?
President Joe Biden’s initial insistence that only he, a man completely unable to articulate, could oppose Trump was mansplaining on a grand scale. The build-up of rage over this fuelled Kamala Harris’s momentum when he finally gave way.
There’s a theory that Biden waited to exit until Trump had locked in his running mate, JD Vance. Vance is so hard-line, he’s a political problem for Trump. It’s a puzzle why any woman (or, in fact, any male family member) would vote for a ticket that promises sweeping abortion bans.
In Republican-ruled states it’s now dangerous to be a woman of childbearing age. All pregnant women and girls, including those hoping for a baby, may be denied life-saving care in the case of miscarriage, rape or foetal non-viability. Access to IVF, medical abortion and contraception is threatened.
America’s current great drama is all about women, life, freedom. There’s such a stark contrast between Harris’s dynamism and Trump’s misogynist idea of what a woman should be. His daughter Ivanka’s strangled, plastic obedience seems like a form of moronic enslavement. She’s just the kind of girl Daddy likes: comprehensively tamed.
The stage is set, the world holds its breath; the denouement is uncertain. It would be fitting if a powerful woman could reduce Trump from aspiring autocrat to citizen, and send him towards justice. The 78-year-old felon facing the prosecutor (attorney-general, senator, vice-president) is striving to find catchy insults for her. So far, he’s come up with “she’s a bum”. Meanwhile, he’s told followers they need only vote for him once. After that, “It’ll be fixed.” No more voting necessary.
More than ever, Trump’s power derives from uncanny spectacle. His bizarre orange and white face, the surreal rants on sharks and windmills, the mystifying non sequiturs about Hannibal Lecter. Words don’t matter; it’s all atmospherics. He has the mesmeric aura of a witch doctor. He’s so instinctively compelling, you can imagine he has an apocalyptic, evolutionary role. Perhaps nature has produced this freakish demagogue to lead us to extinction. If so, it’ll have to be a strong woman who saves us.
Charlotte Grimshaw is an Auckland author and critic.
