POTUS - or Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive
This satiric black-as-black and very funny farce could scarcely be more timely. But the producers, Hannah Greenwood and Tilly Legge, say that’s fortuitous. They were already in rehearsal before the 2024 US election and ‘No matter what administration is in charge,’ they say, ‘idiocy is bipartisan.’ Be that as it may, they’ve found no reason to amend the script, and no one is going to watch POTUS without thinking of the dangerous circus occurring right now in the real White House.
The frantic, non-stop action of POTUS all happens on one chaotic, crisis-ridden day. A catastrophe has already occurred. White House Press Secretary Jean (Tilly Legge) is frantic while magisterial Chief of Staff Harriet (Carolyn Bock) tries to minimise and maintain calm. Meanwhile, the President’s own secretary, young Stephanie (Liliana Dalton), is too terrified even to knock on the Oval Office door. Oh, and there’s a Gala Feminist Dinner planned for that evening…
This potentially parlous situation is not helped by a desperate political journalist - and nursing mother - Chris (AYA) roaming the corridors on the hunt for a scandal, not the least of which are just how the President acquired an anal abscess, or whether he will pardon his drug dealer twin sister Bernadette (Hannah Greenwood), and, a late addition, exotic dancer Dusty (Lucy Ansell) who says she is pregnant with the President’s baby. It’s just another day at the office and POTUS is that kind of play. And since it’s all women talking to women, the language gets very racy, the niceties are not observed, and the wisecracks get nasty.
POTUS is a play that depends on pace and a hard edge to every action and every word. Director Marni Mount ensures that’s what we get. No sentiment, no melting moments. As a farce, it has those two essential qualities of farce: it moves at a fast clip, never pausing for breath – or logic - and no character ever thinks that whatever happens is farcical or absurd. No, for those on stage, this is all very serious. They’re all too busy trying to cover the President’s (distressed) arse, or their own, or to maintain a shred of dignity or integrity, keep their job, stay out of gaol, or win a paternity suit.
Selina Fillinger’s politically knowing, cynical text, animated by a powerhouse cast - plus Sophie Woodward’s costume design - all things that set up and distinguish among the seven women so that we are never for a moment lost as to who is who and what their issue is. The lynchpin is probably Carolyn Bock, who brings her great stage presence and authority to her Chief of Staff role – providing an (almost) steady centre for the others who rotate, panic and spin around her. Except, that is, for Lucy Ansell’s remarkable performance as Dusty, in her follow-me-fuck-me white cowboy boots, maintaining a preternatural calm and cheerful sangfroid throughout – which is very funny just in itself. Tilly Legge’s Press Secretary Jean is a tall, classy, highly intelligent, quintessentially cool character – or that’s what she would be if she could be. Another fine performance alert to all the inherent ironies and ambivalence.
AYA’s journalist Chris is the epitome of the sour, contained fury that drives her ruthlessness. Liliana Dalton (whom I last saw as Caligula!) resonates as the quivering Stephanie, proving Dalton is as fine a comedian as she is an intense dramatic actor. First Lady Margaret’s leading quality is ‘earthy’ and that’s what Candy Bowers gives us, a marvellous front, like Margaret’s myriad charities, for her knowledge of her husband and what’s really going on. And Hannah Greenwood’s drug dealer Bernadette provides a clever, devil-may-care bogan contrast to the sniffy White House crew.
To maintain the sense of time passing, while everything is done in haste and on the run, Sophie Woodward’s highly original design is made up of successive ‘layers’ of curtains from downstage to upstage which the cast open and close at speed, reinforcing the metaphor of secrets and things hidden. There are also crucial doors wheeled on, when necessary, until the final denouement when we know we are in a White House corridor.
Under the frenetic action, however, there is more than farce. All the best comedy is driven by anger and here that anger is subtext. It would be more to the fore were not the women, like so many women, being preoccupied and just plain busy dealing with an incompetent man and that day’s shit. Clearly the President is a ‘dumbass’ and when Chief of Staff Harriet has a moment to catch her breath, she laments that she has spent thirty years hiding that fact from the world. Pregnant dancer Dusty, far from as dumb as she might look, is impressed by Harriet and asks, ‘Why isn’t she the President?’ And she gets the rueful answer, ‘That’s the eternal question.’ Press Secretary Jean, a woman sadly demeaned daily by her job, is just too frazzled and exhausted by having to lie and cover up day after day after day. Reporter Chris, juggling two kids plus a newborn and a useless partner, is driven by the relentless news cycle by which she must deliver or quit… (That news cycle, an inherent factor in any contemporary political drama, is present via the just audible, continual burble of television news in Rachel Lewindon’s sound design.)
There are fleeting moments, it’s true, where the momentum stalls – but it recovers in an instant – or where things are just too ridiculous, but the breathless momentum, and the high energy of the cast, carries all before it.
Michael Brindley
Photographer: James Reiser
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