The President by Thomas Benrhard (1975) is almost 50 years old. It is a perplexing play, (translated by Gitta Honegger) that instantiates the obsessions of those who wield political power. Its wild loops of language - repetition, and subtle repetition, elongation, and clipped repeats - hammers home the weird wilfulness of those who exercise such power and await the uprising of those whom they repress. This production is a joint effort of the Sydney Theatre Company and the Gate Theatre, Dublin. The director is Tom Creed.
The structure of the work is starkly unbalanced. Bernhard mentions opera a lot: Carmen, This was the opera comique masterpiece that in Nietzsche’s eyes ultimately overthrew the obsessions and oppressions of the Wagnerian world view. It also ends in death, but without any transfiguration.
Act 1 is almost like one long scena for the prima donna assoluta (The First Lady). The play riffs excessively on a limited number of related themes. After the attempted assassination of the dictator, and the death of a disposable Colonel, we swirl within a vortex, whereby particles of thought are forever in our ears. These include the maudlin emphasis on the death of the First Lady’s beloved dog – treasured more than any dead Colonel. We also become well acquainted with the narrative of the off-stage Rasputin like figure of the beloved chaplain who explicates the nature of insurgency while taking his fill of the regime’s wealth. We are hammered with the pre murderous guilt or otherwise of the son, the archaeologist, who unearths dead civilisation, while we hover mid-air with the spite that beauty can feel towards the unbeautiful. Throughout, there is a chilling focus on time and ageing. We are inside the presidential palace, dressing for power, in fear of power, yet full of worship of that same power: “the whole country is ruled by fear”.
It is excessive, it is draining, it is repetitive, yet like Rossini its roulades of language are both muscular and haunting. We are immersed in the furious excesses of fear and loathing. This discourse feels like the thrashing of an indomitable life force operating within an enormous echo chamber, whereby a bravura performance of survival is increasingly challenged by political turmoil and revenge, by waves of disgust and disbelief, and silenced by external events as a boulder is hurled through their bedroom windows.
Olwen Fouéré rides this dogged dogmatic creature with sheer will and a wild energy.
In the second half of the play, set in Portugal, the President (Hugo Weaving) is given two scenas, one a lopsided love aria that focuses on his hubris, energy, and passion for the art of politics. It is a hymn to the creativity that a powerful ruler may unleash to gain and hold onto their power. Again, this was a tour de force of the actor’s craft, taxing for the audience, but Bernhard gives us a little more humanity with rhetorical flourishes that articulate how the lust for power is formed early in a life – and requires the commitment to do anything to seize and hold onto its many frisssons.
Though the Presidents’ young lover is worn down by the drunken weariness of the great man’s lecture about his very own greatness – she is still transfixed by the guiding light he wishes to shine on her; the pretty, unformed soubrette from the country who is both lover and mentee, both controlled and controlling agent. She flaunts her rising social and financial mobility. She fleeces her lover of his money at the gambling tables and is prepared to be deluded by the subsidiary wish for her own greatness (without easily believing in its possibility).
The second scena for The President was a dogged men’s room justification of masculine power, floating over the jagged awareness of his impending doom - bluff, and more bluff, fear, and more fear – until his co-conspirators, members of a military elite, metaphorically turn from the smell of death amongst their ranks.
Structurally it seemed overlong then suddenly morphed into the funeral of the dictator. The transformation was dramatic agit-prop. Here was another Stalin lying in state with a dirge of musical sounds that seemed to exonerate his sins. Assassination offstage was the order of the day.
The two halves of the play were like gendered, double portraits of bravado and violence – the yin and yang – of people who were corruptible, self-indulgent, and treacherous. As characters, embodiments, symbols, both the President and the First Lady are fascinating and frustrating and loathsome.
The wordiness of the play is part of its charm and its curse, part of its link to Beckett and, as the director implies, a subliminal connection with the talkiness of Wilde. Its staccato outbursts seem to test language and feeling and survivability in a bleak world of immense violence, and the constant echoing of deeply ingrained fear. This bleakness also engenders some darkly comic ruminations: nasty and oppressive. Bernhard channels coruscating anger with ease.
At interval I heard groups splintering on the basis of who was staying on and who was leaving. Many stayed and many walked across the backstage to pay homage to the dead dictator in his glass coffin. Its Brechtian disorientation was modestly felt. This final dramatic structure cut short any applause for the bravura performances we had witnessed. This seemed to sit well with the playwright’s expressed dislike and contempt for actors.
Julie Forsythe was particularly strong in the comprimario role of the dresser (Mrs Frolick) – whose twenty years of service seemed like a metaphor for how both communities and individual citizens might survive each wave of dictatorship: serve in abasement but hold on to revenge. Her comic timing was impeccable within an excruciatingly servile role.
The thankless role of the mistress (Actress) was given verisimilitude by Kate Gilmore. We see how she floats along the current of her beauty and her lovers besottedness. This is a relationship hinged on shared laughter and loud bragging. She recovered beautifully when he threw a glass of champagne into her face – as violence once more surfaced and its accommodation nestled down with survival.
The large austere set (Elizabeth Gadsby) gives us a boudoir in Act 1 and a luxury hotel with private dining and drinking in Act 2 The excessive soundscape (Stefan Gregory) was almost another player in this production, scraping out our ear drums with shattering discords and funereal brass. It, as least, overcame the wordiness. The stark blazing lighting (Sinead McKenna) and grinding sound ground us into either submission or aversion. A work of divisive intent, indeed.
Sydney Theatre Company, Packer Theatre, Sydney, April 30, 2024
Gar Jones
The structure of the work is starkly unbalanced. Bernhard mentions opera a lot: Carmen, This was the opera comique masterpiece that in Nietzsche’s eyes ultimately overthrew the obsessions and oppressions of the Wagnerian world view. It also ends in death, but without any transfiguration.
Act 1 is almost like one long scena for the prima donna assoluta (The First Lady). The play riffs excessively on a limited number of related themes. After the attempted assassination of the dictator, and the death of a disposable Colonel, we swirl within a vortex, whereby particles of thought are forever in our ears. These include the maudlin emphasis on the death of the First Lady’s beloved dog – treasured more than any dead Colonel. We also become well acquainted with the narrative of the off-stage Rasputin like figure of the beloved chaplain who explicates the nature of insurgency while taking his fill of the regime’s wealth. We are hammered with the pre murderous guilt or otherwise of the son, the archaeologist, who unearths dead civilisation, while we hover mid-air with the spite that beauty can feel towards the unbeautiful. Throughout, there is a chilling focus on time and ageing. We are inside the presidential palace, dressing for power, in fear of power, yet full of worship of that same power: “the whole country is ruled by fear”.
It is excessive, it is draining, it is repetitive, yet like Rossini its roulades of language are both muscular and haunting. We are immersed in the furious excesses of fear and loathing. This discourse feels like the thrashing of an indomitable life force operating within an enormous echo chamber, whereby a bravura performance of survival is increasingly challenged by political turmoil and revenge, by waves of disgust and disbelief, and silenced by external events as a boulder is hurled through their bedroom windows.
Olwen Fouéré rides this dogged dogmatic creature with sheer will and a wild energy.
In the second half of the play, set in Portugal, the President (Hugo Weaving) is given two scenas, one a lopsided love aria that focuses on his hubris, energy, and passion for the art of politics. It is a hymn to the creativity that a powerful ruler may unleash to gain and hold onto their power. Again, this was a tour de force of the actor’s craft, taxing for the audience, but Bernhard gives us a little more humanity with rhetorical flourishes that articulate how the lust for power is formed early in a life – and requires the commitment to do anything to seize and hold onto its many frisssons.
Though the Presidents’ young lover is worn down by the drunken weariness of the great man’s lecture about his very own greatness – she is still transfixed by the guiding light he wishes to shine on her; the pretty, unformed soubrette from the country who is both lover and mentee, both controlled and controlling agent. She flaunts her rising social and financial mobility. She fleeces her lover of his money at the gambling tables and is prepared to be deluded by the subsidiary wish for her own greatness (without easily believing in its possibility).
The second scena for The President was a dogged men’s room justification of masculine power, floating over the jagged awareness of his impending doom - bluff, and more bluff, fear, and more fear – until his co-conspirators, members of a military elite, metaphorically turn from the smell of death amongst their ranks.
Structurally it seemed overlong then suddenly morphed into the funeral of the dictator. The transformation was dramatic agit-prop. Here was another Stalin lying in state with a dirge of musical sounds that seemed to exonerate his sins. Assassination offstage was the order of the day.
The two halves of the play were like gendered, double portraits of bravado and violence – the yin and yang – of people who were corruptible, self-indulgent, and treacherous. As characters, embodiments, symbols, both the President and the First Lady are fascinating and frustrating and loathsome.
The wordiness of the play is part of its charm and its curse, part of its link to Beckett and, as the director implies, a subliminal connection with the talkiness of Wilde. Its staccato outbursts seem to test language and feeling and survivability in a bleak world of immense violence, and the constant echoing of deeply ingrained fear. This bleakness also engenders some darkly comic ruminations: nasty and oppressive. Bernhard channels coruscating anger with ease.
At interval I heard groups splintering on the basis of who was staying on and who was leaving. Many stayed and many walked across the backstage to pay homage to the dead dictator in his glass coffin. Its Brechtian disorientation was modestly felt. This final dramatic structure cut short any applause for the bravura performances we had witnessed. This seemed to sit well with the playwright’s expressed dislike and contempt for actors.
Julie Forsythe was particularly strong in the comprimario role of the dresser (Mrs Frolick) – whose twenty years of service seemed like a metaphor for how both communities and individual citizens might survive each wave of dictatorship: serve in abasement but hold on to revenge. Her comic timing was impeccable within an excruciatingly servile role.
The thankless role of the mistress (Actress) was given verisimilitude by Kate Gilmore. We see how she floats along the current of her beauty and her lovers besottedness. This is a relationship hinged on shared laughter and loud bragging. She recovered beautifully when he threw a glass of champagne into her face – as violence once more surfaced and its accommodation nestled down with survival.
The large austere set (Elizabeth Gadsby) gives us a boudoir in Act 1 and a luxury hotel with private dining and drinking in Act 2 The excessive soundscape (Stefan Gregory) was almost another player in this production, scraping out our ear drums with shattering discords and funereal brass. It, as least, overcame the wordiness. The stark blazing lighting (Sinead McKenna) and grinding sound ground us into either submission or aversion. A work of divisive intent, indeed.
Sydney Theatre Company, Packer Theatre, Sydney, April 30, 2024
Gar Jones
