A time when Trump might yet have been re-elected - on the Chichester stage

Harry Lloyd and Claire Skinner share the stage as it plays Chichester’s Minerva Theatre (August 26-September 24). And maybe it’s only now that Christopher realises the trauma of losing it first time around: “We hadn't cast it but we had started the creative conversations in a pretty significant way. It was supposed to be in the fall and we were already working towards it. But I actually had a little fantasy, when Covid happened, that your country would be much better at dealing with it than our country was! But obviously it didn't happen and pretty much everybody was in the same boat. I did hold on to the hope for longer than was realistic but what I really discovered was what a big deal emotionally it was to have a play just frozen on you in that way. I completely accepted what was happening in a realistic sense but once we started rehearsing here, I found such an intense emotional release about the whole thing, that I had worked to shape this work and to make it happen and I didn't realise how much not getting the chance to do that had affected me until it came to the moment where we could actually make it happen.

“At the time I left the play for quite a while and even when I thought we were going to do it I still left it for quite a while before going back to it, still thinking that there could be yet another variant along the way! But I just found that I was not quite ready to do it immediately. I didn't start the rewriting until May and I went through it line by line and worked through the whole thing. Anybody that just read it casually would not think there were many changes but anybody that read it in a much deeper way would sense something quite significant had happened. There are no new characters and no new scenes but I went through it really forensically and there was a shift. It is hard to summarise what happened but I think that the big change was that it was originally set in 2017 just after the 2016 election which Trump had won.”

And the point is that at the time of writing, Trump could yet have won the 2020 election: “It was still in that zone where we didn't know what was happening and I think it is that aspect that I have changed.”

In a sense then, it has become a history piece – albeit recent history. It is still set In 2017 but we know now that Trump did not get back as president: “But there is a now a tension that is very much alive in America, that people really are thinking that he could yet win again. If you believe the polls, he would be the choice for the Republican nominee if he runs again and Joe Biden’s approval ratings are hardly great, are they. There is a tremendous fear that Trump could return as president. And what the play is asking is how can that be possible."