Apparently Thomas Bernhard left one of his own plays early and when he was retrieving his coat from the cloakroom the attendant said to him, "You don't like it either, do you?"
Bernhard's 1975 play The President has opened at the Gate Theatre as a co-production between the Sydney Theatre Company and the Gate, and it runs until the end of March before going on tour to Australia.
Locked away in the palace after a failed assassination attempt, the President and the First Lady are left to curse their predicament. For almost the entirety of the first half, Olwen Fouéré delivers an impossible rant as the First Lady showing her fraying psyche while her husband audibly bathes and receives a massage offstage.
They both spend the play raging against the anarchist uprising closing in around them, which has already claimed their beloved dog and a 'favoured’ Colonel in the crosshairs and counts among its recruits their absent son. The much-needed levity comes in the form of withering looks between the First Lady’s servant Mrs Frolick - played for maximum effect by Julie Forysth - and the audience, as well as a ridiculously kitsch portrait of the lost pet.
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Listen: RTÉ Arena talks to Tom Creed, director of The President
The first monologue is a feat of sustained, physical acting from Fouéré that explains in minute detail the assassination attempt and the impossibility of living with a threatened dictator, but it leads to little in the way of character development or interactions that we come to expect from drama. This is the result of it being an absurdist satire.
Satire is often described as a mirror held up to ridicule the worst excesses of the powerful, and that is what we get here. The stage is a wall of mirrors creating a clever claustrophobic effect that reveals the embattled mindset of the characters. As rulers, they are not concerned with their subjects, instead they bemoan at great length their own fate as the mirrors reflect the worsening depths of their turmoil and self-obsession.
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Listen: Miriam O'Callaghan talks to Hugo Weaving
This absurdist work by the Austrian writer pushes actors and audiences through a series of somewhat jaded tirades on class, unfulfilled potential and marital dysfunction that amount to the paranoid delusions of those drunk on their own power and importance. Written and first performed in 1975, there are clear echoes of megalomaniacs bestriding today’s political stages in Tom Creed’s production.
In the second act the mirrors switch to an idyllic coastal vista in Portugal that is projected onto the walls as the President (Hugo Weaving) escapes the confinement of the palace to relax with his actor-mistress (Kate Gilmore). While imbibing copious amounts of champagne, Weaving bores her to sleep with his bombastic recollections before she gambles his money away in disdainful retribution in the resort casino.
The impending doom for this dictator is an end to the black humour that is welcomed with relief by the audience as well the much-put-upon servants who are only really allowed express themselves physically through facial expressions and dismayed shrugs. After the protracted monologues, we are treated to a theatrical flourish in the final scene as the talking has finally finished and all that is left to do is mourn.
While being deeply unserious throughout, the play tests our patience for the woes of these powerful characters as we are made privy to the affair in Sintra, slapstick abuse of staff and farcical war-cabinet meetings. Thomas Bernhard is famed for these exuberant yet deeply pessimistic characters.
Some context around Bernhard might be helpful to understand where the uncompromising bent of his writing comes from and why. He was a postmodernist Austrian author known to harangue readers and audiences on the page and stage with lengthy monologues that amount to exaggerated set-pieces concocted to satirise power structures and the bureaucracies that culminated in fascism.
Bernhard’s work was heavily critical of the Austrian political elite’s complicity and silence around the country’s Nazi past. So pronounced was his aversion to the Austrian State, that when he died in 1989 his will expressly refused to give the State permission to produce or publish any of his works in Austria while they were still in copyright, so for seventy years. Indeed, like Sean O’Casey and the reception the Plough and the Stars received at the Abbey Theatre, Thomas Bernhard was booed by audiences in Vienna because he made the Austrian elites uncomfortable about how implicated they were in their Nazi history.
★★★★ Review: The President – Towering performances and stunning design combine in this rare gem of European theatre @GateTheatreDub
— The Stage (@TheStage) February 12, 2024
Read The Stage's review 👇
https://t.co/Mi18rR1kXl
Bernhard is a German-language giant of European letters, a playwright we rarely see produced on Irish stages. It is welcome that audiences have the chance to experience his singular theatre thanks to the translation by Gitta Honegger and brought to life by such a consummate cast, with the inimitable Olwen Fouéré and Hugo Weaving in the lead roles as the Presidential couple.
When this play was first produced in the 1970’s, despots like Salazar were rife around Europe and this insider look would have been novel for the outlandish satirical qualities that it brought to the stage. For today’s audiences, the effects of this satire are blunted because we have lived through a more absurd Presidential farce, and in the era of the 24-hour news-cycle.
The mirror becomes a less effective dramatic device when it was our saturated reality. And on the horizon we perhaps face another term, so as they say, first lived as farce and second time around as tragedy.
The President is at The Gate Theatre, Dublin until March 24th 2024 - find out more here.
