Theatre review: Hugo Weaving and Olwen Fouéré shine in The President
Olwen Fouéré and Hugo Weaving in The President, at the Gate Theatre. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
★★★★☆
The great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whose 1975 play The President is given here what Cork director Tom Creed says is a first outing in English, was reputed to have said “in my writing the musical component comes first, and the subject matter is secondary".
And while the subject matter in this play is very clearly the unsettled politics of its time in Mitteleuropa (Baader-Meinhof Group and all that) what is strange, difficult and, ultimately, compelling, comes from that almost musical quality, with the words, themes, stories, and memories repeated over and over in a series of monologues.
The President may be about a power couple, Olwen Fouéré as the First Lady, and Hugo Weaving of Lord of the Rings fame as the titular President. But really, these are a couple in the promotional shots only. There is precious little dialogue.
We see Fouéré first. She sits at a dressing table in a large room, glass on two sides, a white curtain along the third. It looks rather like an out-of-proportion dressing room in a swanky department store. She faces us, and begins to recount the latest assassination attempt on her husband. We only hear Weaving offstage for now, groaning and moaning in his injuries. His Colonel wasn’t so lucky, however. He was number 19 on the anarchists’ hitlist. The President could have been number 20.
Fouéré’s words come first like an awkward unsung aria, with repeated phrases, before shifting into verse worthy of a Greek drama, as Bernhard and Creed evoke all those tragic wives of the theatre’s powerful men: Antigone, Clytemnestra, Lady Macbeth, and so on.
But the First Lady is no tragic heroine. In Bernhard’s view, she is one of those monsters who’d sooner mourn a pet than a human. Indeed, just as you think she might be addressing some dead gods in her almost classical delivery, it turns out she’s talking mostly to her dead dog. In her view, the pooch is the real “tragic” victim of the anarchist’s bullet.
If the first act teeters almost into a one-woman show, it is redeemed as a comedy double act thanks to Fouéré’s fire and Julie Forsyth’s timing as the meek, near-mute butt of the First Lady’s unhinged insults, Mrs Frolick. The second act takes a similar form. We swap the capital for Portugal’s Atlantic coast, and the mirrored walls of Elizabeth Gadsby’s set now reveal a sunkissed paradise as Weaving takes his turn to browbeat an underling, in this case, his mistress.
Again it’s a part of few lines, but Kate Gilmore hilariously communicates what a bombastic bore she takes the President to be. As he downs booze at a heroic rate, the President retreads the story told by Fouéré, while also mansplaining her, carping about her affairs, and delivering a bravura display of incipient inebriation that is a treat to behold.
Scene changes come with flashing lights and cacophonous music, evoking modern-day torture methods. It’s a nod in keeping with the supposed political nature of this play. But thankfully, Creed steers away otherwise from allusions to the dictators, strong men, and sundry wannabes who increasingly populate today’s world stage.
After all, Bernhard strips the political details to their most basic – just “anarchists” versus a conservative regime – the better to reveal the crass stupidity of megalomania, and how unaccountable power corrupts and maddens. The method does lack dramatic impetus, but the strong performances more than compensate.
And just when you’re wondering where it’s all going to go, there is a final coup de theatre which quite literally has the entire audience on their feet. It’s a rousing finale to an otherwise rather cerebral piece, and certainly worth going along to experience.
- The President is a co-production between the Gate Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company, running until March 24, at the Gate Theatre Dublin
