The President by Thomas Bernhard

In a small, unnamed country, there has been an assassination. However, the gunmen missed their intended targets, the President and the First Lady, killing instead a loyal bodyguard and the First Lady’s beloved dog.

As a revolution brews right outside their front door, the First Lady sits with a mixture of hysterics, rage and obsession. The President holds forth in a verbal tsunami of self-aggrandisement and vainglory, while his mistress, an actress, gambles his cash away in the blackjack room next door.

With its depictions of the abuses of power, the disdain and paranoia of privilege, and prophecies of the age of surveillance, corruption and terrorism, The President is as striking and resonant when it was first performed in 1975.