Bill’s annus horribilis – told by the women
Devil with the Blue Dress
Bunker Theatre, London SE1
Bill Clinton was a hard-working, decent-minded president who was the victim of a culture of American machismo that required him to exploit his charisma, flirt with everyone he met and reciprocate the amorous interest shown in him by younger women. I don’t really think that, but wouldn’t it be refreshing if, rather than taking the unsurprising path of rehashing the Clinton/ Lewinsky scandal to chime with these #Metoo times, a playwright dared to play devil’s advocate and presented Bubba as buckling under the phenomenal pressures of leadership?
New York-based Kevin Armento’s new play Devil with the Blue Dress rewinds to Clinton’s annus horribilis of 1998, when his denials that he had had “sexual relations” with White House intern Monica Lewinsky were exposed as big fat fibs. She could prove that things had got sticky during their three-year fling (across which the evening also skims, without getting explicit). He was impeached, got off, lived to fight another day and support his forgiving wife’s own presidential hopes. Lewinsky has spent the rest of her life in the shadow of the affair.
Armento doesn’t give us Clinton’s perspective per se – instead this is a piece for five actresses. As well as Monica and Hillary, there’s also Chelsea Clinton, Linda Tripp and Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s trusty PA. What accumulates as the narrative tacks this way and that is a heightened sense of how women look out for each other, or don’t, in the corridors of power.
The staging – from the Bunker’s artistic director Joshua Mctaggart – is thoughtful, smartly paced, beautifully lit and there’s not a weak link in his cast. Daniella Isaacs’s startlingly lookalike Monica relays the early infatuation and later disenchantment with aplomb, and Flora Montgomery’s Hillary begins as the picture of icy self-composure but cracks under the weight of humiliation. Useful, interesting, absorbing – but not, as the world-fixating scandal was, dynamite.
Until April 28. Tickets: 020 7234 0486; bunkertheatre.com