Many stories can be written about Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary, from her experience as a child living in a slaveholding family to her campaign later in life for a pension as the wife of an assassinated President.
Unfortunately, John Ransom-Phillips's play Mrs President can feel like a disjointed stream of consciousness in which it is difficult to establish the show’s point of view. Maybe it's the fevered grief-driven dream of Mary, or perhaps the disturbed, slightly paranoid, rambling visions of the photographer Mathew Brady who claims all his creations are coming back for more pictures. It isn't easy to tell.
All scenes in the seventy-five-minute play are set in the photographer’s studio, though at one point, the actor Sam Jenkins-Shaw ties a noose around his neck as he stands on a chair to become the abolitionist John Brown, about to be hanged, talking to Mary (Miriam Grace Edwards) about the possibilities of suicide. On another occasion, he becomes a judge declaring women are the property of men.
We also get scenes where a camera chats amiably with a chair. The camera explains, “born in Liverpool, I am barely out of nappies.” The chair reveals it was transformed “into a chair after 330 years as a tree.” Perhaps the conversations were meant to be a humorous break from Mary’s grief over deaths in the family.
The deaths of her husband and three children constantly play on her mind, as she later wanders the stage dressed in black and at one point creates a circle of salt in preparation for a séance.
Miriam Grace Edwards as Mary and Sam Jenkins-Shaw as Brady give intense, confident performances of the unfocused script.
Dip into the play anywhere and you might be intrigued and even entertained, only moments later to be puzzled by a sudden shift away from whatever grabbed your attention. The show may swiftly give a peculiar splash of subjects such as slavery, women’s oppression and the impact of photography on the politics of the period, but it does so in such a fragmentary way, you could easily miss the point they might be making.
John Ransom-Phillips is also a painter. His dreamlike pictures with their ghostlike figures that tilt towards a colourful abstract may work for some people on canvas but as theatre, the audience needs something more.