Review: ROTUS: RECEPTIONIST OF THE UNITED STATES, Park Theatre

MAGA womanhood is a curious paradox, observed with interest across the pond after a third of women under 30 voted for Trump in 2024. How can so many women not only tolerate but actively promote policies that seek to harm them, and how can the general public recognise their grift for what it is?

Irish writer-performer Leigh Douglas certainly looks the part, with extensions drenched in peroxide, immaculate pussy bow and vocal fry designed to denounce the fake news media. When you hear her ask the audience to “scream if you love freedom”, you almost want to join in.

She’s playing Chastity Quirke, a beauty influencer who weaves the Republican agenda into her TikToks and has worked her way up to be the improbably influential receptionist working outside the Oval Office. In a terrifyingly prescient plotline set at the end of ‘Ronald Drumpf’’s second term, Chastity finds herself unwillingly at the centre of a conspiracy to retain the presidency at all costs.

The issue is that sometimes the analysis here of what makes conservative women tick stops at the foundation-caked surface. Douglas has unrelenting energy as a performer (exploited to its maximum by director Fiona Kingwill), which works for the bizarre Jesus-themed choreo Chastity performs for her former sorority sisters, but after we’ve heard “make America hot again” and the like deadpanned five or six times, we long for the satire to dig a little deeper into Chastity’s ideology.

Does Chastity genuinely believe the lines she’s peddling, or is it all “just so boys will like me”, as she claims at a climactic moment? There’s something to be said for leaving these questions to the audience’s imagination, but Douglas’ writing is frustratingly inconsistent rather than interestingly ambiguous. Indeed, when we hear about how Chastity’s father’s life was shaped by the injustices of the US labour and healthcare systems, we wonder why she became so fervently conservative at all.

Similarly, other women alongside Chastity in President Drumpf’s White House (and also played by Douglas) have pivotal roles to play in the story, but feel underdeveloped. Communications assistant Liberty seems to have few identifying features beyond a high-pitched, pageant-trained monotone.

Meanwhile, seasoned White House press secretary Candace feels like a confusing mishmash of different models of conservative womanhood – she’s drinking whiskey to keep up with the boys one minute, but trying desperately to get pregnant before 30 the next – and oddly doesn’t seem to take many cues from the Gen-Z ideological dogmatism of the real White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.

Because of these thin characterisations, and the show’s meandering pacing – there’s more than one important character whom we only meet past the halfway mark – the switch the audience needs to undergo from disgust to sympathy towards Chastity is unearned. The use of a voiceover at key moments goes some way in making Chastity more introspective, but mostly just explains what should already be obvious (“I was too young and pretty to realise they hated women”).

Perhaps ROTUS might serve as a handy parable to anyone who’s occasionally found themselves taken in by tradwife content on social media, and a reminder of the insidiousness of working for one’s oppressor. But in order to say anything more salient about what draws women to the rigid gender roles of the American Right, the satire needs to be populated with characters rather than caricatures.

ROTUS plays at Park Theatre until 7 February