Features
Bush: The straightjacket years
A US president
operates under huge
amounts of stress, but
what might finally send
him over the edge? A
new play delves into
the psychology of
George W Bush.
Steve Pratt reports
AMERICAN actor and academic
Jon Farris is no stranger to the
world of US presidents. Hes
portrayed Richard Nixon in
two plays, Secret Honour and Nixons
Nixon. In his current presidential
drama, Patient No 1, hes treating a
troubled White House resident rather
than playing him.
Hes the eminent psychologist in a
mental asylum treating a VIP patient C
George W Bush, no less C in a play set
two years in the future. Leading political
playwright Donald Freeds tragifarce
on the state of American politics
is having its world premiere run at York
Theatre Royal Studio.
Farris is aware of the problems portraying
a real-life politician on stage.
The primary difficulty is what the audience
brings to it because they have
very definite ideas. They dont all have
the same ideas, obviously, but have very
definite baggage they bring in how they
regard this person, he says. You know
that youre playing to that, using it
sometimes, to challenge them and
sometimes to suck them in.
Any good playwright worth his salt
writing a play about an actual person C
whos either alive or has been alive
through most of the life of the audience
C is not going to try to write a history
or even revise history. Its a creative act.
The character created with the name
Harry Truman or Richard Nixon or
George W Bush is not going to be, is not
intended to be, the man. Its the truth
as artistic art.
As Patient No 1 is set in the near future,
the author is imagining events
that have brought the President to his
present state. This is a Bush whos
emotional, paranoid C and I think the
playwright would agree that just because
youre paranoid theyre not out to
get you.
THE production has a British director,
York Theatre Royals artistic
director Damian Cruden, to
whom Farris pays tribute for his perception
and judgement about whats
going to work.
The play is being premiered in this
country ahead of its US staging next
year. Putting Bush in a madhouse cant
help but make the piece provocative. If
you write about a current politician
whos extremely controversial you
would expect that the main issue of the
play is to analyse political stance,
strategies, actions and the wisdom and
success of it all.
For all I know that may have been
the playwrights interest when he began
on the play and ended up taking a quite
different direction from the issues. Its
more interested in the psychology, the
personality of George W Bush, than in
his actions as President.
It was much the same with Freeds
play about Nixon. Each of the audience
may see a different Nixon on the same
night. After one performance, one person
said how dare you besmirch the
name of the greatest president and
someone else said how dare you whitewash
the most vile president.
As for British audiences, Farris hopes
that the core of the play will be perceived
in roughly the same way as
Americans would see it, while admitting
there are going to be certain things
that resonate in the minds of the British
that wouldnt across the Atlantic.
Farris has combined a career of acting
and academia, chairing the theatre
department of Denison University in
Ohio for 21 years. When not teaching
hes hired himself out as an actor, with
a Lear (as actor), Macbeth (as director)
and a Lady Bracknell among his many
credits.
He gives me a soundbite of his imperious
Lady B from Oscar Wildes The
Importance Of Being Earnest. And very
good it sounds.
He took the famous female role because
someone asked him to do it.
There was a woman in the theatre who
had been around quite a long time and
was of an age to play Lady Bracknell
and who was really ticked off, he
recalls.
Farris acted all through school, never
intending to be an academic. He spent
his time on stage with a theatre group,
touring in musicals and plays for a couple
of years.
It was really my decision to stay in
academia and, once I had children, I realised
you cant do that on an actors
salary. I had three children and the expense
of sending them to college.
I was fortunate to work for a university
that favoured professors leaving
campus to pursue their profession other
than teaching. They not only valued
them but encouraged them.
He tended to take the roles that were
offered and fitted in with gaps in his
teaching timetable. Occasionally, he set
time aside in advance for acting work
only to find none was forthcoming.
Overall, his double life has worked
out very well. Ive done a very wide
range of roles and enjoyed doing them.
I guess what I want to do now is be surprised
by something challenging and
deliciously different to anything Ive
done before.
But if someone offers me the chance
to play a role Ive played before in a good
situation and theres a chance at having
a shot at doing it better, I wouldnt hesitate
either.
ö Patient No 1 continues at York
Theatre Royal Studio until May 17.
Tickets 01904-623568 or online at
www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
10:23am Monday 5th May 2008
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