Recuperating after an almost lethal bout of tuberculosis contracted in his twenties, the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) wrote that he had ‘discovered my method of working, my own brand of infamy, my particular form of brutality, my own idiosyncratic taste’. It was a method that from the start made him Austria’s literary hair shirt. In novel after novel and play after play, in form mostly a series of monologues frequently by and about thinly disguised friends and acquaintances, Bernhard excoriated his homeland’s hypocrisy and provincialism. To his critics he was, in that wonderful German word a Nestbeschmutzer, a fouler of his nest. Ironically, the more he positioned himself as an outsider the more he was showered with honours and prizes. He was even, briefly, offered the directorship of the Burgtheater in Vienna. But his work always continued to explore a people who had still not completely adjusted to their Hapsburg and Nazi legacies. His hated rival, Peter Handke, wrote a play Offending the Audience (1966). Bernhard went him one better and insulted a nation.

Bernhard’s play The President (which had its première at the Burgtheater in 1975) seems like something of an outlier in his work. Although it is not set in Austria but in an unnamed country, the Austrian connections are still there. The play’s protagonists, the President and the First Lady, were clearly based on a conservative Austrian politician and his wife, Gerda Maleta. In a country that went from the Hapsburgs through Dolfuss to Hitler and still had leaders with clear Nazi associations, authoritarianism ran deep in Austrian society. At the time of writing, in a reaction to what they considered to be the continuation of autocracy, the so-called Red Army enacted a series of assassinations and abductions of right-wing politicians and business leaders which unsettled the powerful. The President is the portrayal of a terminal dictatorship.

Bernhard’s mature novels are notoriously paragraph-free tirades that skirt constantly on the brink of being boring – indeed, for some readers, dive headfirst over the edge – and his plays are mostly similar in construction. At one stage, Bernhard trained to be an opera singer and in his diatribes’ repetition and elaboration of themes one can see similarities to eighteenth-century arias. The President comprises, in effect, two monologues: the opening half the First Lady’s; and the second, the President’s. Bernhard presents his performers with a huge challenge to make them work theatrically.

Julie Forsyth as Mrs Frolick, Olwen Fouéré as the First Lady, and Hugo Weaving as the President (photograph by Daniel Boud)

In the co-production by the Sydney Theatre Company and Ireland’s Gate Theatre at present at the Roslyn Packer, despite the best efforts of a valiant, talented, hard-working cast, The President refuses to take wing. Of sound and fury there is plenty but of signification little. The President comes across as decidedly less than the sum of its parts. In his novels Bernhard mostly filters his narrative through an observer which gives him an extra level of complexity. Moreover he frequently shows an ambivalence towards his characters. He ends Woodcutters (1984), his most acerbic work, by admitting: ‘I hated these people but could not help loving them.’ But here we have a rather hackneyed picture of an authoritarian couple. Do we really need to spend two and a half hours being told that dictators are lecherous, self-obsessed oafs and their wives narcissistic paranoiacs?

There has been yet another failed assassination attempt on the President in which a trusted adviser has been shot and the First Lady’s beloved lapdog has dropped dead of a heart attack. As the couple prepare for the adviser’s funeral the First Lady taunts, derides, and unburdens herself to her maid Mrs Frolick. Bernhard described Gerda Maleta, the woman on whom he based the First Lady, as having ‘two ounces of brains and seven pounds of sex’, a description which the lady in question immediately confirmed by taking the comment as a compliment. Olwen Fouéré’s version is a much icier creature, despising her husband, fearing her son, who, she suspects, fired the fatal bullet, and reserving any remaining tenderness for the memory of her dog. Fouéré and Julie Forsyth as the put-upon servant manage to squeeze some humour out of their scenes and Fouéré’s performance is a technical tour de force but Bernhard hasn’t given her or director Tom Creed any opportunity to develop the character, and Fouéré’s performance is all surface.

As the President, Hugo Weaving is luckier in that we get more of a sense of the President’s background as he rambles on first drunkenly to his young mistress, the decidedly unimpressed Kate Gilmore, and then to his Portuguese hosts. Weaving is especially effective as his character becomes drunker, leading to the one genuinely shocking moment in the play. But although we learn a bit more about the President, what we learn is not particularly interesting.

Elisabeth Gatsby’s set, a box with an open forth side, works well as both the gloomy presidential mansion and the terrace of a Portuguese hotel, and she has some fun with the costumes, especially one the unfortunate Mrs Frolick is forced to wear. Stephan Gregory mixes light music and threatening noise to create the sense of a rancid operetta.

This production is apparently both the Irish and the Australian première of The President. Unfortunately, it is easy to see why it has taken this long for the play to appear in both countries.

The President (Sydney Theatre Company) continues at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until 19 May 2024. Performance attended: 17 April.