From Thatcherism to global crisis to an ever-online world, she has chronicled our race to the abyss. Now she’s written a play about a blond-wigged voicepiece for an un-named, strongman ruler. Who can she mean?

Triumph, which has just opened at London’s Almeida theatre, is Caryl Churchill’s latest piece of explosive minimalism. Running at just 20 minutes, it skewers contemporary barbarism without mentioning the names of Trump, Putin or any of the other supposedly strong national leaders. It works through historical analogy and is a reminder that Churchill – while “always ahead of the game” in the words of the play’s director, James Macdonald – has in recent years developed a form of elliptical drama for which the apt word might be compressionism.

At the heart of Churchill’s new play is an edgy romance between a male journalist and a female press officer who dons a blond wig for her screen appearances and who is a vigorous apologist for a cruel, vindictive, narcissistic emperor.

Almeida theatre, London
In a bloody, brilliant, full circle Rupert Goold bows out as artistic director of the Almeida with a timely revival of the musical he first staged here in 2013

The term “yuppie” conjures visions of shoulder pads, Filofaxes and liquid lunches. This is the world Patrick Bateman inhabits and Bret Easton Ellis’s narcissistic banker is every inch the embodiment of it – a creature of Wall Street’s hedonistic heyday, blinging in designer-wear as he swings his axe at high-end escorts and the homeless.

So Rupert Goold’s decision to resurrect this musical adaptation of Ellis’s ghastly 1991 masterpiece is not without risk. Don’t these singing yuppies seem ridiculously passé now in their boxy suits and Ralph Lauren underwear? The satire is amped to 10, licking its lips, it seems, as it sends up the 1980s. But it never spirals into kitsch and our contemporary world of toxic masculinity, Trumpian capitalism and Insta-fuelled solipsism slowly, chillingly, creeps out of it.

As the musical version of the notoriously gory book returns to the stage, its tale of 80s yuppie nihilism feels more relevant than ever in the era of Andrew Tate, Trump and tech bros

I have just witnessed a murder. Spattered against the white walls of the Almeida theatre are several thin streaks of blood. Underneath them a particularly gruesome-looking hand axe rests on a table. And on the other side of the room, a clue to who the perpetrator might be. Discarded next to someone’s laptop is a business card – bone-coloured, raised black lettering – bearing a familiar name: Patrick Bateman.

Him again.