We seldom see Thomas Bernhard’s play performed on the Australian stage. In 35 years of fairly hardcore theatre going, this is only the third play by one of the most important writers in the 20th-century Germanosphere I’ve seen. The second was an STC production of The Histrionic, back in 2012. The first, Force of Habit, directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon for Anthill Theatre in Melbourne in 1993, featured Julie Forsyth, who is (fun fact) also in this production.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Like his German language contemporaries Peter Handke and Botho Strauss, Bernhard (who died in 1989) is, in box office parlance, a pretty hard sell. Among the hardest, in fact.

That said, The President is among the most accessible of his dozen or so major plays and this Sydney Theatre Company and Gate Theatre (Dublin) co-production does have a couple of major audience drawcards in Hugo Weaving and Ireland’s Olwen Fouéré.

Julie Forsyth and Olwyn Fouéré (seated) in The President. Photo © Daniel Boud

Written in 1975 (this Gitta Honegger translation dates back to 1982), The President opens in a dressing room of the Presidential Palace, where the nameless First Lady (Fouéré)...