"No President" explores competition, artistic identity, and the absurdities of show business, blending high art and low comedy with a political edge. It's work that refuses to be easily categorised or dismissed, even when it's driving you to distraction.
There's something profoundly unsettling about watching this 'story ballet of enlightenment in two immoral acts' unfold, Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's "No President" at the Southbank Centre delivers a beautiful, bewildering discomfort. This production—a showdown between rival gangs of former actors and ballet dancers vying to protect a mysterious theatre curtain—defies conventional expectation of what theatre should be, and therein lies both its power and its problem.
The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma has amassed an impressive reputation for boundary-pushing work, and "No President" stands as perhaps their most audacious experiment yet. But you need to experience this to see it for it to make any kind of sense—describing it feels like trying to explain a fever dream to someone who's never had one. Synopsis here.
Finding your footing in this theatrical landscape requires patience and surrender to its unconventional cadences. The performances push theatrical excess to breaking point, with actors wielding exaggerated expressions and fluid, ballet-inflected physicality that oscillates between beautiful and disturbing. Robert M. Johanson serves as our relentless guide, delivering a two hour+ unbroken stream of intricate, alliterative pun-laden text while the ensemble executes their choreographed chaos in absolute silence. Even with projected subtitles working overtime to unpack the script's dense literary puzzles, there are moments when focus inevitably wavers under the weight of such concentrated artistic intensity.
The production's use of a reinterpreted Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker score is striking—some parts missing, others repeated endlessly, but maintaining the intensity and anxiety of the original. This juxtaposition of traditional Christmas music against the surreal company antics creates a cognitive dissonance that's brilliant and deeply unsettling. The familiar melodies become twisted into something altogether more sinister, a perfect sonic backdrop for the chaos unfolding on stage. The engine of the production is Mikey (Ilan Bachrach). Bachrach delivers a tour de force performance, his remarkable physicality and relentless energy becoming the evening's most compelling elements, he never, ever stopped!
The evening escalates into increasingly visceral physical comedy, with the company deploying meaty theatrical props, bright fabrics standing in for bodily emissions, and darkly comic tableaux depicting consumption, violent sexual intimacy, and suicide. These sequences for some outstay their welcome, generating unease rather than laughter. The trickling exodus of audience members throughout the night confirmed that this overwhelming sensory assault wasn't universally appreciated.
This fusion of high art, movement, spoken word, and crude physicality commits fully to its absurdist vision across every element of its construction. The production insists on complete attention, deliberately stretches endurance, and inevitably divides its witnesses. The departing patrons seemed almost anticipated—their retreat becoming part of the evening's broader commentary on artistic tolerance and complicity, a response that felt almost choreographed into the evening's design.
The performance I attended was interrupted when an audience member was taken suddenly ill, Bachrach waking into the audience to immediately offer support, and didn't restart until much later. I had to catch my train back to Brighton and missed the final twenty minutes, so I'm assuming (and hoping) there was some kind of Stanislavskian 'happy ending' to this extraordinary piece, as the deity of Method acting appears regularly in the Byzantian plot. But perhaps that's fitting—"No President" is a work that resists easy conclusions.
What struck me was how the piece reflects on audience complicity in what we witness on stage. I left intrigued, bemused, and charmed by the daftness while simultaneously disturbed by the slow beating drum of narrative which constantly calls back to a society that excuses bad behaviour with psychobabble and personal indulgences. The recurring Cheetos motif cuts like a perfectly manicured nail—these grotesquely orange, artificially flavoured poison pellets serving as a apt metaphor for our current political hellscape, all synthetic addiction and zero nutritional value, like a certain spray-tanned demagogue.
This is theatre that's political in the way that clowns are political—showing us uncomfortable truths about ourselves, our behaviours, and our performances as we navigate our daily lives. The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma holds up a funhouse mirror to our collective cultural moment, and the reflection is hilarious and horrifying.
"No President" explores themes of competition, artistic identity, and the absurdities of show business through its boundary-pushing approach, blending high art and low comedy with a political edge. It's work that refuses to be easily categorised or dismissed, even when it's driving you to distraction.
There are only two more performances left—grab tickets quickly if you want to experience this singular piece of theatrical chaos. Just be prepared for an evening that will challenge every assumption you have about what theatre can and should be.
"No President" runs at the Southbank Centre until Friday 11th July . Tickets available at southbankcentre.co.uk
