Review: OUR AMERICAN QUEEN, Bridewell Theatre

The stage is immediately set for a confrontation. We the audience are looking down the length of a Victorian dining table, lit from beneath, poised perfectly for domestic rows to erupt before the meal is even served.

It’s unsurprising, then, that Our American Queen – like US company The American Vicarious’s other upcoming London production, Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley – is also a ‘debate play’, a dramatisation of a conflict in America’s political history, told through the lens of those who argued over it.

Unlike Baldwin vs Buckley, though, this is not one historic moment magnified on stage, but a series of bitter arguments between those orbiting power. A clipped, brusque Wallis Currie-Wood is Kate Chase, daughter of Salmon P. Chase, Treasury Secretary under Lincoln, vocal opponent of slavery and advocate for Black men fighting in the US Civil War. As Chase Snr (Darrell Brockis) prepares to stand against Lincoln for the Republican presidential nomination, the sacrifices Kate makes for her father’s career become ever more evident.

While the play’s depictions of behind-closed-doors realpolitik can feel on the nose – “politics is the art of ‘it depends’,” a character says at one point – Thomas Klingenstein’s script does not cling to this for longer than necessary. Instead, it hones in on Kate’s spiky chemistry with Lincoln’s secretary John Hay (Tom Victor), anchored by a subtle performance from Currie-Wood. With John, Kate discusses Dickens and Whitman, but must abandon him in favour of an advantageous marriage to her father’s ally.

The personal running up against the political is perhaps the true debate on display here. Early on, there is loaded speculation on Mrs Lincoln’s wardrobe and interior decor choices, and Kate displays her political savvy hosting endless dinner parties. What start as innocuous literary debates between Kate and John spiral into clashes between idealism and cynicism, between love and duty, between pragmatism and the luxury of choice.

Director Christopher McElroen has clearly thought deeply about inventive ways to stage an argument – characters face one another, turn their backs, stand on furniture and proceed to destroy it. It’s a shame, then, that this imaginative physical theatre is hampered by an oversized picture frame at the back of the set, a device that adds little other than the occasional postcard artwork of Civil War casualties, a reminder of the broader national mythology underlying this period.

There’s also more than one reference here to preserving the nation of the United States, and more than one romanticised anecdote about George Washington’s retirement. The effect is a neoliberal fantasy of Chase and his allies as a few good men out to save America, which rings hollow as the country veers closer to fascism. The one Alexander Hamilton namedrop near the beginning feels like a lament for that other theatrical bastion of naive Obama-era optimism.

A debate play must not only present an issue and dramatise it, but also make a case for that issue to be brought up again now. In focusing so tightly on a few, highly privileged lives, Our American Queen fails to make sense of its story within a broader historical narrative. A tale about women’s soft political power in the 19th century sounds like a worthy proposition, but I remain unconvinced that Civil War backroom deals are the right arena for that story.

Our American Queen plays at Bridewell Theatre until 7 February