By Kate Lock
Political playwright Donald Freed's Patient No 1 envisages a future
with American President George W. Bush in a remote psychiatric clinic, a
new female president and the US virtually under martial law. Kate Lock
was at the world premiere in York.
There is a Doonesbury cartoon that suggests a reason why President
George W Bush originally threatened to veto Senator (now Republican
candidate) John McCain’s Anti-Torture Amendment back in 2005. It has
to do with red-hot coat hangers and frat boys’ buttocks.
Bush, like his father, went to Yale, where being branded on the
behind was, apparently, par for the course for fraternity members of DKE
(‘Delta Kappa Epsilon’). Except that it didn’t end there. Like his
father, George Bush Senior, he joined the Ivy League university’s
elite secret society, Skull and Bones, where the initiation rituals were
altogether darker and more disturbing.
Rob Pickavance as Patient No 1
Did these experiences colour his views on torture, as suggested by
playwright Donald Freed, too? Dubbya did an about-turn on the amendment
not long after the Yale practices were revealed. One suspects ‘They’
hauled him back into line. Trudeau, a Yale contemporary, has Bush
hollering defiantly from the roof of the White House, ‘Human pyramids?
Hell, I did those as a cheerleader.’
I didn’t know much about Bush’s back story before seeing Patient
No. 1, which had its world premiere at York’s Theatre Royal on
Tuesday, so I found the repeated references to ‘DKE’ and ‘Bonesmen’
confusing.
An American audience would presumably get this more readily, but
then, given Freed’s premise that their president is nothing more than
a crowd-pleasing, pre-programmed puppet, US audiences are likely to have
a rather different take on the whole thing.
Patient No. 1 was originally deemed too politically sensitive to find
a home in its homeland. However, it is now due to be staged in LA (with
a different cast and director) just before the presidential election on
4th November. While the first-night audience in York was politely
receptive, I suspect that the audience for its US premiere will, one way
or the other, be more emotionally engaged.
John Farris as the Doctor
Ironically, by the time the new president is inaugurated in 2009,
real time and play-time will have almost caught up: Patient No. 1 is set
a couple of years into the future, with a new (female!) president in
charge, the US virtually under martial law and the world reeling from
who-knows-what horror.
The play refers to the ‘Second Wave’ of ‘2/13’, which sounds
like an unhappy Valentine for Hillary and appears to be the tipping
point for the attempted Bush-whacking that follows. When Dubbya fails to
do himself in on his dirt bike, he’s drugged, bundled into a
helicopter and taken to a private psychiatric clinic in the Florida
Everglades.
Barefoot, and in a grubby, open-backed shift, our first sight of the
former president is shocking. He shuffles into the consulting room
practically comatose, guided by his secret service agent with flapping
hand signals as if he’s backing up a lorry. ‘Jesus Christ,’ gasps
the Doctor (Jon Farris), appalled.
Farris – who has an air of Donald Sutherland about him – carries
the first half of the play almost entirely. The patient (Robert
Pickavance), locked down by medication, can only splutter and gag and
strains to expel incoherent ‘P-p-p’ noises, while the agent’s
vocabulary doesn’t extend beyond security-speak.
Freed, who has been writer-in-residence at the Theatre Royal these
past few months, describes the play as a ‘tragi-farce’. He has a lot
of fun with the exchanges between the eloquent doctor and the robotic
responses of Bush’s ‘Number one Pretorian guard’ as he calls John
Roe (or is it Doe? Jonathan Race’s anonymous SS man is quite as
brainwashed as Bush).
The agent and the former president
Whether you find the idea of Bush’s trigger-happy cowboy fantasy
funny or frightening, there are certainly nuggets of black humour: in a
free-association exercise, the patient responds to the word ‘Democracy’
with snores.
Similarly, director Damien Cruddan enjoys the Key Largo conceit,
punctuating the forties’ psychodrama pastiche with bursts of strings
like a Hitchcock suspenser.
The play has a filmic quality and the intimate studio space suits the
claustrophobic setting. I didn’t mind the slow pace, but after such an
extended build-up, the climactic showdown was more psychobabble than
psychodrama and revealed nothing more telling about Bush than an already
well-documented fixation with his father.
Perhaps that was the point. Freed wants us to see the bigger picture,
and we are all a part of that, whether we see Bush as a scapegoat,
martyr or war-monger. Even the liberal doctor, reciting his ‘We do not
torture’ mantra, appears ambivalent about whether he wants to cure the
patient or punish him.
Farris is totally convincing as the doc and Pickavance turns in a
tour-de-force performance as Bush but ultimately I didn’t feel pity
for the ‘patient’. If anything, it was Race’s security agent, who
finally comprehends the true meaning of ‘shock and awe’, that moved
me.
Rob Pickavance as Patient No 1
Freed has said he wants to demystify Bush, to show him not as a
cartoon figure but as a person (though I doubt the man himself would be
flattered by the brain-dead get-out). It didn’t quite work for me: the
gurning, gung-ho ‘Ranch-hand’ (Bush’s code name) reminded me
irresistibly of satirist Steve Bell’s monkey-man, while the medicated
mental-patient scenario seemed just too unbelievable.
Maybe, though, that’s because I find it impossible to grasp the
geopolitical scale of power that Donald Freed, who has studied
these things, can see (he is a veteran political playwright and made the
1984 film Secret Honour, about Nixon). Maybe I just don’t want to
imagine that corruption could run so deep.
A stimulating and provocative play, whatever your politics, that had
me debating (and Googling) late into the night. Is it more disturbing to
think that the lunatics have taken over the asylum – or that they
merely appear to have done?
Kate Lock
