by “Politics is the highest art form, baby,” says the sleazy and bombastic titular president to his acting mistress in this rarely performed Thomas Bernhard play from 1975. “The art of acting comes right after .”
This president is the leader of a small European country with no name, which is hidden on the coast of Portugal from gossips, anarchists and the son of a murderer after yet another assassination attempt. His megalomaniacs are ripe, and some of our shameless leaders are acting like old cronies.
Related: Hugo Weaving: ‘This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done’
Played by Hugo Weaving in a Sydney Theater Company co-production with Dublin’s Gate Theatre, this president is a vulnerable comedian with a penchant for grandiose drama that punctuates his flashbacks. self-aggrandizing with Trumpian hand gestures.
His First Lady, played by Irish actress Olwen Fouéré, claims to love the works of French writers such as Proust and Voltaire, but there are no Enlightenment values involved as she repeatedly bullies her servant Mrs Frolick (Julie Forsyth), a physical comedian. a silent witness to these dictators. The First Lady returns again and again to her dark view of the essence of life: “ambition / torture / hatred / all that”.
Directed by Ireland’s Tom Creed, after his first season in Dublin, the first half will see President Fouéré delivering a monologue about the forces arrayed against the incumbent. She’s also that kind of actress, performing annually in a children’s play, and she’s more invested in this year’s production than crying over a brand new corner.
There are funny interludes about a beloved dog, the only creature the First Lady can empathize with but has suffered collateral damage from an assassin’s bullet. Mrs. Frolick almost steals the show, especially when she puts on stage a gold-framed image of the deceased terrier, sentimentally painted in the heavens.
But lines are repeatedly tested for endurance in these two scenes, testing the audience’s patience for revelation. Almost everything in this drama has happened before the present or is imagined in the future. But in these two scenes, there is not much dramatic or comedic payoff, and the same results could be delivered in half the running time.
Although Fouéré’s delivery is ultimately a voluminous aria of self-obsession, her delivery is precise, especially at the beginning. Perhaps this is meant to convey the First Lady’s insanity and increasing detachment from reality, but it is hard to come to grips with.
Bernhard was born in the Netherlands in 1931, but his Austrian mother took him to Bavaria in 1937 during Nazi rule, and he had to join the Hitler Youth. He had direct experience of Goebbels’ propaganda, which inspired the writing that expressed his reputation for cowardly autocrats and their enablers.
His English translator, Gitta Honegger, addresses the criticism of repetition in his writing as “a conscious technique that defines language as a quotation system. If we don’t mention others we will mention ourselves. As soon as we speak, we are personifications…” Bernhard’s agenda, she writes in the introduction to her translation, is to “propose linguistic structures that would be detached from their foundations in order to include any possibility of spontaneous original thought express”.
But this circuitous, regressive approach to language could be dead at times. Sure, Bernhard’s darkly comic attitude and his repeated appearances are reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Happy Days, but those plays fare better because timeless comedies plumb the absurdity of life as we can ourselves can be seen in Beckett’s usual characters, cheerfully soldiering on in the face of futility. for their efforts.
In a work marked by political satire, we look more for a reflection on our times, for our doubts about the future of democracy to be widely written. Indeed, when president Weaving mentions “a huge paper conspiracy / against us / all the newspapers / every one of them / a huge paper conspiracy”, we think of a certain US political party that recycles his cries of “witch hunt ” when held. to account – but we’re already getting that self-serving satire daily in our news cycle.
The emphasis on newspapers in The President reflects its age. This era deserves a political satire that addresses, say, the role of social and partisan media in promulgating disinformation, our growing dystopia of irreconcilable division.
Bernhard’s rejoinder after the interval, in the third scene, makes clearer sense because Weaving and his mistress are full of champagne as they retreat to Portugal. Drunk people often repeat themselves aggressively and this creates the most comically successful scene. The fourth scene, in which the president meets his hosts in Portugal, does not add much depth or narrative to what has gone before.
The finale, the fifth short scene, is an audience participation gimmick that I won’t spoil here, but it’s one that Bernhard didn’t expect in his script, suggesting that Creed didn’t trust him. the original ending .
Go and see The President for Weaving’s funny, commanding performance, Forsyth’s funny physical behavior, and Fouéré’s acting athleticism. But you will have to persevere with the hollowness of the lies that have passed through time and time again – no doubt only exposure for those who have given up on the news.
