1 hr 55 mins, Amazon Prime (and others), and Charing Cross Theatre, til 16 March 2025

⭐⭐⭐/⭐⭐

A weekend of vibe-based productions lacking in story.

In any storytelling medium – novels, plays, film, TV – you can usually draw a distinction between the story itself, and the craft of the storytelling. Quality in one doesn’t always lead to quality in the other. Sometimes a great story is buried in terrible execution; sometimes excellent writing or direction exists without much of an underpinning narrative. I’d say there’s plenty of literature, theatre and film that falls into the latter category, and some audiences are completely happy to bask in the beauty of good prose or appealing visuals without needing to be anchored to a story.

I am not one of those people. No matter how gorgeous the cinematography, how breathtaking the written word, I’m not going to stick with your creation if you can’t give me a strong story to follow. I’m adding this note about my personal tastes as a bit of a caveat to the lower ratings I’m giving to the two subjects of today’s review (at least one of which is pretty beloved). One’s an old film and the other a new play, but I was struck by a similarity between the two that has led me to bundle them in together: both seemed to focus on atmosphere and tone rather than constructing a satisfying narrative through-line. One did so effectively enough to at least warrant three stars, while the other . . . didn’t.

Let’s start with the film, Peter Weir’s 1975 Australian classic Picnic at Hanging Rock (recently re-released in cinemas following a 4K clean-up). Based on the Joan Lindsay novel, it’s been described as a ‘fever dream’ and could be classed as fantasy, sci-fi or psychological thriller depending on your persuasion. It’s a pretty simple story: on a posh school outing in 1900, three girls and their teacher disappear without a trace. But not before some weird occurrences involving stopped watches, group naps and strange proclamations from the wandering schoolgirls. The rest of the film (sort of) follows the fallout from the disappearance, including some desperate searching from a randy Englishman and unrest back at the school.

Judging it on its merits as a ‘fever dream’, I can’t fault Peter Weir on the craftsmanship of the movie. It’s weird as heck. The cinematography from Russell Boyd captures the saturated colours of a hot Australian summertime and the lazy pacing creates an atmosphere of disquiet and unpleasantness. Bruce Smeaton’s score (heavy on the panpipes and piano riffs) I found oppressive at times, but I think that’s kind of the point; similarly, the cast hit the weirdness brief by offering a well-executed mix of melodrama and woodenness.

Production values aside though, for those of us who want a bit more of a story to hang onto (like yours truly), there’s not much going for Picnic and Hanging Rock. The main narrative thrust is the search for the missing girls, which doesn’t really develop or progress. It probably doesn’t help that most modern viewers will already know the ending, making it even harder to be intrigued by the mystery of what happened to Miranda, Irma, and . . . er . . . the other ones. It’s basically two hours of vibes. Well-executed vibes, but just vibes. 

Mrs President, by John Ransom Philips, similarly favours vibes over story, but doesn’t quite nail the craft as well. The Mrs President in question is Mrs Mary Lincoln: Southern belle, mother of four and wife to Honest Abe. The play is a two-hander, with Mary’s opposite number being the pompous and at times even sadistic portrait photographer Matthew Brady. In their sessions together Brady rakes up trauma from Mary’s past to try to find the version of her that he wants to capture in his art – will it be the ill-fitting Kentucky dame barely accepted by Washington society? The lonely daughter of a dead mother? The bereft wife and parent driven mad with grief?

There’s a genuinely interesting theme being explored somewhere within Mrs President: who creates our legacy? Our identity, even? How do we define who we are in the eyes of others? Unfortunately, this theme isn’t particularly well-served by the play around it. Philips and director Bronagh Lagan are obviously aiming for surrealism, with Brady morphing into his own subjects and Mary frequently reliving various memories. But the result is just that Mrs President is quite hard to follow from scene to scene. I was fairly confused as to whether these sessions were taking place over days or years – how long did Brady spend on his quest to capture Mary’s likeness? This is important because despite Mrs President being a play with only two characters, Brady and Mary’s relationship is ill-defined. He’s largely portrayed as a villain, traumatising her and shaping her to suit his own artistic ends, but it’s kind of hard to buy this characterisation given she’s the one paying him money to take her picture (again and again). 

Maybe I’m being a bit too pedantic thinking about such pedestrian matters when the play is so deliberately designed to operate outside a conventional narrative structure. But I think it’s also hard to enjoy Mrs President on that level because the writing is so hit-and-miss. There are several scenes in which Brady’s studio chair and camera have a chat with each other (yes, the two inanimate objects, each with their own regional accents), in which the chair laments not being a tree anymore. Some lines are just painfully on the nose (“I’m a person, why can’t you see me?”), as are some of the metaphors (we get it, the Tolman apple is her son!). Mrs Lincoln also spends a really large proportion of the play wailing and writhing on the floor, which honestly just gets tiring after a while. (Another similarity with Picnic at Hanging Rock: my fellow cinema-goer noted how the character Sarah seemed to mainly spend her time sadly laying her face down on various surfaces.) 

I’m never going to warm to a play or a movie that focuses on establishing tone and atmosphere over telling a compelling story. In the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, I can at least say that, cinematically speaking, that atmosphere was created well. In Mrs President, I’m not sure I can be so complimentary. 

Visit the Charing Cross Theatre website for tickets to Mrs President.