“I s 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.…