FringeReview UK 2026

Mrs President

Art Pond Foundation

Genre: American Theater, Biographical Drama, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Charing Cross Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“Politics is seduction.” Mary Todd Lincoln has managed a triple exposure this month. She’s offstage and slighted in Thomas Klingenstein’s Our American Queen at Bridewell Theatre (she’s definitely not the queen in that). At the Trafalgar she’s more centre-stage in the uproarious Oh Mary! Finally, after the 2023 premiere, and last year’s Edinburgh run, John Ransom Phillips’ Mrs President gives us the full silverprint. Multiple times. Opening at Charing Cross Theatre  in a new expanded version directed by Bronagh Lagan it runs till March 8. Now starring Keala Settle (The Greatest Showman) in the first major non-singing role, her character’s pictured, more frequently interrogated, manipulated, given “presence” by Matthew Bray (Hal Fowler Les Misérables).

There’s been over 10 years development; even since last year further dramaturgical workshops. Phillips, an academic as well as painter, is obsessed with how history shifts in the telling and winnowing. I didn’t see the 2025 run which was well thought of. This though is more than a scumbling over a glaze. 85 minutes now in a play of slow unskeining needs actors of stature to hold out attention. Happily Settle and Fowler are riveting, though the script starts circling and bumping, refusing to land in the last 15 minutes.

This Mrs President needs an image bult up. Brady can apparently deliver a keynote lecture on this like multiple takes, palimpsests of identity to someone who Brady declares (and she echoes) has no identity. Yet the public, above all President require one of her. It’s a bit like Pygmalion without the swearing. Or indeed intersectional politics (with a late exception) that even Shaw makes more explicit. Who’s seducing whom?

The act of surrendering to the role of image in order to placate and bolster, is also seduction: a role the people will accept, or more specifically Brady’s interpretation of their acceptance. There’s collaboration too, and Settle makes much of Mary’s slipped regality. Not just in the way she insists less and less on the title (and inevitably it’s taken from her in the last scenes). But in refusing to seduce and standing on her dignity, she risks falling under Brady’s techniques instead. Settle conveys how Mary’s aware of this, but also how vulnerable she is.

That’s because the work shifts over to completely different territory. It’s not just that inevitable tragedy of the theatre in April 1865, but also the loss of her son Willie: someone whose photograph she herself took (Brady disapproves of subjects taking photos, a fissure that could have been explored) and begins to obliterate with tears. She represents him with an apple she takes a bite out of. It’s effective theatrically but obscure. Psychic disturbance – her eldest son commits Mary to an asylum later – is where theatricality comes alive; and becomes the most brilliant distraction.

In a work of a painter (there’s images in the programme and exhibition) capturing dreams and presence is something Phillips takes seriously. His adversions to the psychic realm aren’t for him moments of credulity or scepticism. Mrs Lincoln, who initially insists on the titular Mrs President, was famously 14 inches shorter than her husband; they were never photographed together. Till Brady famously ghosted Lincoln in a double exposure he’s candid about here.

In a world of palimpsests, Anna Kesley’s sumptuous set and costume designs out of photographs and a touch of Ingres (Phillips knows him) mightn’t be overwhelming. A mint green room with mid-19^th century furnishing and multiple changes are extremely impressive on their own. But marry them to Derek Anderson’s hyperactive lighting and Eamonn O’Dwyer’s composition and snap sound design and you have Brady opening a book and stretching wings into a bird he stabs, and then setting it upon a stand. The synchronicity of sound and lighting with movement (credit to movement and associate director Sam Rayner here) literally dazzle. Anderson’s and O’Dwyer’s work are amongst the most impressively synched I can remember.

This is though another layer. Inducted to give full rein to Mary’s interiority, the realm Brady’s teasing out to get another take, but also a limited assertion of Mary’s own agency, distress and objectification. There’s a sequence as Mother of the Nation solidly realised; and as mourner which teases and shudders away. The trouble lies in Phillips as a gestural painter. You can see how he literally imagines from his paintings. We see images like that apple clearly: it’s striking. But what exactly does it mean? Mary’s distress is non-specific, though surely grief hardly needs the justice of an image. In shoving Mary though to a sided psychic realm with voices and fluttering images we’re moving more to M. R James than P. T. Barnum – whose closeness to Brady and thus Settle in her famous role is wittily explored in his being the one character Fowler doesn’t play, beyond his core Brady. “Until now I never knew/that fluttering things have so distinct a shade” wrote Wallace Stevens. It’s the shade we see.

Fowler plays several, including anachronistically the Attorney General who, when Mary petitions to be released from the asylum, declares that women and slaves are possessions and can’t thus be released from anywhere. Now this is after the Civil War when slaves were freed, to a degree, and women not yet. It’s the one time the objectification of women is explicitly centred. Phillips is more oblique and often rewarding, but he doesn’t seem to know how to end. A series of prints by viedeographer Ben Hews are flashed up like spirit images: the atmosphere here is rapt, apt, exquisite. The final photograph though is withheld, as is a sense of apotheosis. Mary literally isn’t developed in the last take: and Settle, whose last few minutes are individually so impressive, is trapped: in the negative, not allowed her print.

Settle explodes several times with Mary’s grief, though the almost clinical environment serves these up on a plate: discrete, separate, contained. That’s the point though naturally it doesn’t release Mary or ourselves. Easily one of the most visually immersive and intelligent shows now playing, as well as theatrically imagined, Mrs President also haunts itself, as well as Mary. Hints of poststructuralism, deconstruction and a kind of hauntology – a lost future self – are allowed their jouissance; but plays need them too. Mrs President will continue to haunt and I suspect, develop. Be haunted though.

Production Manager Dan Weager, Casting Director Jane Deitch, General Manager Aria Entertainment, CSM Tessa Alderton, ASM Gwenan Bain, Head of Wardrobe Ruth Keeling, Costumer Supervisor Megan Rarity, Marketing Aria Entertainment, PR Fourth Wall PR, Ticketing Manager Paul Hicks, Digital Advertising Altair Media, Key Artwork Muse Creative, Michael Wharley, Photographer Pamela Raith, Videographer Ben Hews.

Published January 28, 2026January 29, 2026 by Simon Jenner