MRS PRESIDENT
Charing Cross Theatre
★★★
“exciting and compelling to watch”
There are a few key questions at the heart of Mrs President, a reworked and deepened version of John Ransom Phillips’ play, first presented last year. Who gets to control your image, especially when a visual representation is intended to enter the public domain as a painting or a photograph? Is the subject in control, or the creator? Then, once the portrait gets set in collective memory, can the real person behind it ever be truly known or understood? Questions for our time, perhaps.
Mrs President reimagines the story of Mary Todd Lincoln as a series of scenes set in a photographer’s studio after critical moments in her life – becoming the First Lady, the death of her son Willie and the assassination of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln. Shunned by society, accused of treason, and struggling with grief, she approaches photographer Mathew Brady to create a portrait that will show the world who she really is. But Brady has his own ideas and their fraught collaboration becomes a psychological exploration of truth, identity and agency.
Keala Settle plays Mary Todd Lincoln. It is an inspired piece of casting. Settle first grabbed attention in the film ‘The Greatest Showman’ when, as the bearded lady, she belted out the song ‘This is me’. As Lincoln fights for control of her image with Brady – Hal Fowler – that cry for recognition is at the heart of the battle. Although this is a non-singing role for Settle, she brings all the power of her voice and commanding presence to give us a towering performance as the misunderstood wife.
Fowler has a lot to do. Through a number of dream-like sequences and transitions designed to illustrate Lincoln’s complex journey, he takes on many parts, from the artist James Audubon, to the judge Marion R.M Wallace who committed Lincoln to an asylum as legally insane. As a result, his character as Brady is never fully developed, and he comes over as rather weak, which is a shame because Brady himself achieved renown for his pioneering work in the Civil War and after. But this is not his story.
The technical achievement is particularly notable. Director Bronagh Lagan and a very strong creative team work with a single-set stage – suitably enclosed within a gilded picture frame – using lighting and video projection to illustrate and support the narrative. This is critical because there are so many shifts and transitions, between characters, time, emotional states and narrative that the play threatens to descend into chaos but survives just in time – no doubt an echo of Lincoln’s life itself.
This complexity makes Mrs President exciting and compelling to watch, but not straightforward. I did a bit of background reading before coming to the show and some familiarity with Mary Todd Lincoln’s story definitely enhances appreciation of the nuances. In the end, as written and probably intended, the underlying question was never really answered. Just who was Mary Todd Lincoln? We are left wondering whether she even knew herself – and whether a photograph could ever show her, even if she did?
MRS PRESIDENT
Charing Cross Theatre
Reviewed on 27th January 2026
by Louise Sibley
Photography by Pamela Raith
