Simon Ward reviews Mrs. President at the Charing Cross Theatre

When Keala Settle makes her entrance as Mary Lincoln in John Ransom Phillips’s play, there is a momentary pause when she poses, framed and majestic, as though waiting for the applause with which a Broadway audience would greet a star of her stature. The applause never comes – welcome to London, Ms Settle. The Charing Cross Theatre nestles under the arches beneath the station, like a wartime retreat for Londoners suffering the rigours of the Blitz. It makes a fitting backdrop, too, for Anna Kelsey’s set – a mid-nineteenth century photographer’s studio full of the new-fangled apparatus designed to manufacture the miracle of an image taken directly from life. Yet, what Mrs. Lincoln really wants from photographer Matthew Brady (Hal Fowler) is a picture that will transform her in the eyes of the public and win them round to her virtues.

It is remarkable how modern Mary Lincoln’s predicament is. Although the superficial circumstances of her life over 150 years ago are different from ours in myriad ways, her challenge in trying to define and live up to the role of First Lady still has strong resonance today. The fact that she likes to style herself Mrs President, plays up the strangeness of the ill-defined role. It might be argued that her age when photography was on the rise marked the beginnings of the image-obsessed world that we now inhabit. Matthew Brady’s images of Abraham Lincoln were, in fact, instrumental in defining him in the imagination of the public, and creating his popularity. Yet paradoxically, the more the public loved Lincoln, the more they disliked his wife. Her spending habits, her living arrangements with her sister, her appearance were all subjected to scrutiny and disapproval. And all this in spite of her never having sought public office in her own right at all.

Settle delivers a performance of great emotional power – we really feel the weight of Mary’s burden. Her transformation from a woman pinning her hopes on a photograph to change her fortune, to one worn down by tragedy and grief is reflected in the move from the flamboyance of her extravagantly hooped and whale-boned dresses when she first appears to the sombre black of her mourning attire. Lincoln’s assassination is a shocking and visceral moment. Fowler portrays photographer Brady as a kind of magical trickster – a Wizard of Oz where the absolute last thing you can believe is your own eyes. Why, he can even conjure up the ghost of Lincoln himself. Nor is he afraid to champion his own part in the President’s rise to success – he is quite sure that his imagery is what made Lincoln in the eyes of the world.

In what might otherwise be a rather static setup, director Bronagh Lagan keeps the action flowing and there are extraordinary video effects (designed by Matt Powell). But from Settle’s silent entrance onwards this felt to me like a difficult play with which to succeed in London. I fear that we don’t really know enough about the history of the Lincolns – Mary Lincoln does not really live in our imaginations at all. The closest analogue for us might be Jackie Kennedy, who endured similar challenges and is better known simply by being more recent. It felt to me that the piece was freighted with greater meaning and power than I could take in, frustratingly just out of reach.

Mrs. President is running at the Charing Cross Theatre, The Arches, Villiers Street, London WC2N 6NL until Sunday 8th March