Hugo Weaving is repellent yet compelling in STC’s The President

The President ★★★★
Ros Packer Theatre, until May 19

There is a certain theatre in the fastidious laying out of a dress uniform, from hat to shoes and everything in between, by a diligent housekeeper. There is theatre, too, in the opening of a bottle of champagne by a uniformed attendant. And there is a great deal of theatre in a state funeral.

Olwen Fouéré as the First Lady and Hugo Weaving as the titular president.Credit: Daniel Boud

Then there are words. Words pouring out in strangely repetitive, sometimes enigmatic, but always mesmerising diatribes.

The Sydney Theatre Company and Gate Theatre production of Thomas Bernhard’s deeply, darkly, difficult The President moves at one of two paces: either with precise, deliberate moves from a silent lackey or in grandiose, almost Beckettian monologues from the two main characters, the president of an unnamed middle-European state, and his wife.

We meet the first lady (Olwen Fouéré) sitting at her dressing table in a peignoir. The president (Hugo Weaving) is, from what we can surmise from noises offstage, in the bath. The first lady’s dressing table faces outwards: we are her mirror as she applies eye makeup and inspects her tongue. We are her confidante as she replays the shock of an assassination attempt on the president and dresses for the state funeral of his colonel.

Next, we meet the president on a hotel terrace in Portugal, where he is drinking champagne with his lover, the actress. He muses on the nature of time, the art of politics, and his own brilliance as he gets spectacularly drunk.

First Lady Olwen Fouéré at her dressing table.Credit: Daniel Boud

There they are: two public figures, exposed, unfiltered, and on display in a glass-walled set (designed by Elizabeth Gadsby). Fouéré and Weaving hold the stage for the huge majority of the work. Fouéré is beautiful, vile and pitiful in turn, while Weaving is repellent but compelling in his grandiloquence.

Both just about tolerate rare but memorable interjections from minor characters, such as Mrs Frolick (Julie Forsyth) and the actress (Kate Gilmore).

Then, with the steady increase in thunderous drumbeats and acid fanfares of Stefan Gregory’s underscore and the unsettling exposure of Sinead McKenna’s lighting design, the words become increasingly meaningless, and the atmosphere becomes increasingly threatening.

Eventually, in the final act, the words stop altogether, but in a brilliant theatrical coup, the distinction between public and private, stage and audience, real and make-believe, melts away, leaving you wondering what just happened.

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