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Among the perils of power is losing all sense of when to shut up. Refusing to pass the conch can be a way of reinforcing the speaker’s authority and control. But in Austrian provocateur Thomas Bernhard’s 1975 play The President, which is being staged in English at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, the dictator and first lady of a small, unnamed country seem to be talking themselves towards oblivion.
The action opens following a failed assassination attempt on the President (Hugo Weaving). While he lurks behind the stage coughing and guffawing his way through a bath and massage, his wife (Olwen Fouéré) embarks on a fragmented, hour-long monologue sequence as she dresses for the funeral of a colonel who was killed in the attack. Genuine grief is reserved, however, for the First Lady’s dog, who simultaneously died of a heart attack and is commemorated in a splendidly kitsch portrait. That her unseen son is suspected of having been among the assassins further adds to an aura of moral disarray.
Though somewhat overburdened with exposition here, the monologue form lends itself well to conveying the First Lady’s self-absorption. Her testy interactions with her mostly silent maid Mrs Frolick, played with quivering unease by Julie Forsyth, also bring out the character’s brittle hauteur.
But Fouéré, adopting a uniformly high-strung tone, struggles to inject enough variation into the disjointed, paratactic rhythms of Bernhard’s text (as translated by Gitta Honegger). The playwright’s characteristic repetitions — “My husband went into shock, into shock” — sound mannered in her delivery. And a lack of emotional range flattens the comedy of the Ruritanian setting, the First Lady’s canine obsessions and the alarums and excursions in her husband’s bathroom.
After the interval, the focus shifts to the President, who has decamped to the Portuguese resort of Estoril (a legendary bolt-hole for washed-up autocrats). Having cut a jaded, world-weary figure when he finally emerged from the bathroom towards the end of the play’s first half, he now exudes boisterous braggadocio. Echoing the First Lady, the President’s effusions again take the form of rambling monologues delivered to his actress mistress (played with a skilful blend of nitwittery and cunning by Kate Gilmore) and a clutch of military and diplomatic flunkies. In the latter parts, Bryan Burroughs, Chris McHallem, Will O’Connell and Daniel Reardon do a fine job of cravenly feigning interest.
Weaving invests his role with plenty of sleazy charisma. He also adroitly shifts towards a plaintive, self-pitying and ultimately doom-laden register as the President sinks ever further into his cups. That portrayal perhaps lacks a dash of the ruthless villainy that Weaving brought to Agent Smith in the Matrix series. Rather than a brutal dictator, his President resembles a feckless monarch who is ripe for exile.
Tom Creed’s staging, co-produced by the Sydney Theatre Company, unfolds in an atmosphere of timeless torpor and empty minimalist affluence. While this President invites few obvious parallels with contemporary politics, it concludes with an inspired coup de théâtre that sends up the perennial pomposity of official mourning.
★★★☆☆
To March 24, gatetheatre.ie
