ROTUS

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★

“a sharp, biting, and brilliantly political work—a masterful piece of writing”

A small stage. Did I say small? I mean, broom-cupboard small. Just enough room for one desk, a chair, and a few feet to shuffle around. The venue itself is comically cramped, barely a theatre, more an overstuffed waiting room. Yet the performance triumphs.

Enter Chastity Quirk (Leigh Douglas). Yes, Quirk. And yes, she is quirky. Warm, smiley, inviting — but in that sugary, saccharine way that makes your teeth ache. There’s a voice-over. A delightful interplay of switching characters and voiceover with internal monologue. A receptionist becomes the heart of power, the pretty face behind the ugly truths.

Quirk tells us she’s a people person. She makes people comfortable, unthreatened. Her mother was a hairdresser, she says, and taught her the sacred art of listening — learning other people’s secrets while filing them neatly away like highlights and perms.

Chastity is the ROTUS: Receptionist of the United States. But she’s more than that. She’s an administrative assistant, which in political terms means she’s the machine that makes the machine work. The gatherer of information. The oil in the cogs. The one who makes things happen.

She’s giving a tour to her former sorority sisters — Kappa Gamma Zeta — a chapter that adores her. She also happens to have 300,000 followers for her hair tips. An influencer turned political thought leader—a woman who can sell conditioner and foreign policy in the same breath.

“Do you know how hard it is to get a whole sorority chapter of women to love you all at once?” she asks.

Her boss is President Drumph. And the thing about receptionists? People say anything in front of them. She catalogues disloyalty with the precision of MI5. She’s sugary sweet to her sorority sisters, but she’s merciless to the deranged Speaker of the House.

In an hour, we get a fully fleshed-out Ruth Draper-esque portrait. Leigh Douglas gives us a woman painted in bold strokes, the female characters full of colour and voice, the men flatter, thinner, almost ghosted. Douglas as Chastity dominates the space — blonde locks, West Coast vocal fry, and a smile that could topple cabinets.

That said, the transitions need tightening. The quick shifts from one character to another sometimes feel clunky — all noisy heel-strikes on the floor instead of seamless transformation. But there are flashes of physical brilliance: Chastity sprawled across the desk, one leg elegantly extended into the air, a picture of power masquerading as passivity.

Politically, ROTUS lands hard. It shows us that in the Republican world of patriotic patriarchy, women are essential — whether at the podium or the back office, burning secret files. It’s the pretty that powers the ugly machine—the pretty one who does the ugly work. The Go-To Girls who resist looking thirty, resist looking like lesbians, resist looking like Democrats.

By the end, Chastity is caught in the machinery herself. Other women are blamed, shamed, and maimed. She must choose: follow orders or follow conscience. The character named Liberty provides no liberty. The God-and-Party she serves asks if she’ll take the bullet for them. And Chastity — once the girl with all the privilege — realises she never truly had it at all.

Leigh Douglas’s solo written and acted work, ROTUS: Receptionist of the United States, is a sharp, biting, and brilliantly political work—a masterful piece of writing.

ROTUS

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Reviewed on 21st August 2025 at Snug at Gilded Balloon Patter House

by Louis Kavouras

Photography by Damian Robertson

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