‘a fecund field poignant with possibility’

Reflections on Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s No President

Is this show genius or self-satisfied nonsense? Innovation or indulgence? A blur of relentless information that defies interpretation? Tests patience as much as perception? It’s visually playful but deeply off-putting. Frenzied, pornographic, nonsense that’s also oddly compulsive. On the surface, it all seems rather questionable, absurd even, but I’m certain someone could unpick it through a deeply political lens if they wanted to.

There are seven reviews of No President quoted in that paragraph, representing less than half of those I’ve found that were published when the show was performed for three nights in London in July 2025. All of them convey the plot (weird), the form (weird), and the manifold ways in which the show divided people. Too long! Pretentious! Boring! I loved it! I wrote about it too, in advance, after interviewing Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, artistic directors of Nature Theater of Oklahoma (henceforth OKT, because I like it when they shorten their name to OK Theatre). It’s hard to know what the point is in adding more now, except that deeply political is my favourite lens, and “what is the point?” feels like a question that preoccupies the show itself. What is the point in work? In art? In life in general? What is it that enables a human to get out of bed, day after day, for a job they find soulless, in a culture that by and large no longer believes in the idea of a soul? What are the power structures that make this a necessity? What are people’s coping strategies, and are any of them up to the task?

‘killing time before time kills you’

I should probably do some kind of plot summary too, so here goes: Mikey is an artist, an actor, but mostly out of work (hard relate), so instead he earns money as a security guard, in a firm whose main client has them guarding a red plush theatre curtain. He’s plagued by inner demons but from the firm’s perspective that’s fine, because “an insecure security guard is more effective than a cocky one”. Often he’s on the rota with Georgie, his best friend, with whom he’s choreographing a dance routine in down time; his sworn enemy is the janitor, and he’s besotted with the firm’s supervisor, unfortunately married to the big boss, but not, he hopes, above gentle infidelity. What derails this humdrum existence is the realisation that Georgie is also besotted with the supervisor, and has the benefit of an exquisite turn of phrase in the log-book of “threats perceived or thwarted determining their emolument”.

Let’s pause on that word emolument, one of several used in the show that I had to look up (see also absquatulate, feculent, assuasive, afflatus…). A salary, fee, or profit from employment, rooted in the Latin word for grinding. I love how, in its opacity and etymology, this one word conveys the problem with the gig economy: the obfuscation through which the obvious (worker exploitation) is superseded by the opposite obvious (the worker benefits from flexibility and autonomy), to create a system in which the labourer, supposedly profiting, is pulverised by precarity. But that’s just one word in approximately 1,887,549 that comprise the script, so let’s crack on.

Mikey and Georgie, “a galaxy of two sore hearts orbiting each other”, experience a visitation from the devil. Except the devil is also the client, the man who employs the firm to guard the curtain, who wants his money’s worth in drama, in excitement. And the client is also the narrator, the man who uses the big words, who describes every action on stage, who talks and talks and TALKS and talks and talks and talks some more, almost non-stop for more than two hours, like an MP filibustering parliament.

I’m barely a tenth into the plot but I might as well stop there because the plot isn’t really the point. What is the point? Good question. “The show itself is always only a pretext,” says Pavol. “It could be whatever. It’s there to measure time and to attract attention for the audience. We have suggestions of characters in there, but they’re not for the actors to portray, they’re for the actors to use as tricks to refresh audiences’ attention. For those audience members who need that entertainment of a story, and need to follow a plot, OK, we take care of you and give you that plot – in exchange for your attention and 100% of your engagement, so that we can work on you behind your back, on changing your perception, so that you leave this room having had an experience that’s transformative somehow, that you don’t even know, perhaps, that it happened to you.”

Sounds a bit sinister, maybe? And impossible, perhaps? An impossible task, too great a demand on audience and performers, Pavol and Kelly alike.

‘pithy poetic prose of unparalleled precision’

Mikey might be a pretext but he’s still a human, a mess of foibles, frequently sodomised by an “all-star team” of inner demons, who swoop across the stage in shimmering blue capes and lucha libre wrestling masks. He was tyrannised in childhood too, by his grandmother, remembered with a soft curving hand gesture and harsh words: she saw him as the “fat spawn of a whore”, was “too cheap to enrol him in ballet school”. Mikey is the little guy who “could’ve been somebody”; the lonely guy desperate for love that’s not in his power to take; the white guy who doesn’t understand where all that so-called privilege is, because none of it landed on his plate. So of course, as soon as the opportunity arises for him to anoint himself president (via cannibalism, Georgie’s hospitalisation, and other sundry brutalities), he does.

So much violence in those brackets! A mere fraction of that indulged on stage, however cartoonish, absurd. Mikey intended none of it, but the adrenaline rush, who could resist? I hope I could resist, but in an exercise class the day after Trump was re-elected, I did propose that the bicep-building cross-punches and uppercuts could come in useful on encountering a fascist. Mikey is the Trumpian figure, the embodiment of power as pageant, his speeches full of “threadbare third-hand statements and bloated promises”; and power as narcissism, “a soft-core orgy of one-way adulation”. But sing it again: Mikey is a pretext, a diversion almost. The real power lies elsewhere.

Let’s look at those figures again: the client (capitalism), the devil (religion), the narrator (language). That’s quite some unholy trinity; and, just like the holy trinity, they are all in fact one, held in the single figure of Robert M Johanson. A founding member of OKT, Johanson has performed in most of the company’s works so far, and brings a debonair charisma to the stage, the ease and authority of a suit among tutus. As the client he’s the architect of chaos, responsible for hiring a rival security firm of ballet dancers disguised as “nouveau-riche Russo-Chinese oligarchs” to create the drama, the tension, in the guarding of the theatre curtain that he craves. Is the curtain actually valuable? Who cares! It’s a real thing and also a chimera, like money, like a hedge fund. As the devil he’s equal parts insidious and insouciant, blowing on to the stage in a cloud of Cheeto dust to torment and salve Mikey in unequal measure (confession: I’m that old person not sufficiently up on the memes to have twigged the connection with orange Trump while watching. The shame…). And as the narrator – well, he’s just saying the words being fed into his ears at the same time as they appear on a surtitles screen. He’s not making any of this happen, he’s just describing it, just responding to what’s already there: a human cruelty as innate – so the client, the devil, Trump and his cronies would argue – as it is in the hyenas and “uncultured vultures” that appear in the nature documentaries watched by Mikey, and by the Big Boss before Mikey slaughters him.

There’s no let-up in the narrator’s narration: it’s constant, relentless, like the 24-hour news cycle, the audience bombarded by a barrage of language – but wait! What are these words creeping in now? Bombard: attack continuously using guns or bombs, a military term since the 16th century. Barrage: also used since the first world war to connote a concentrated attack of artillery. I’ve been making a conscious effort to eliminate militarisms from my language for about a decade (tricky when everyone knows you as a freelancer, coined as a fanciful term for a medieval mercenary warrior); but in this specific moment of a genocide being described as a war, precision in language and an avoidance of glib militarisms feels ever more vital. I’ve made myself uncomfortable with this lapse, this failure.

Back to the point. But what is the point? In part, it’s this discomfort, this self-questioning, and how it arises from what Pavol calls “the strict policing of language”. Or what Kelly says: “Language has become much more freighted, bodies have become much more freighted, there are so many things that it’s a landmine to do.” (Another militarism!) The couple are more interested in the landmine than the safe path around it; Pavol says he’s “never ever writing out of a place of knowing or a place of comfort or a place of certainty”. I confessed to them directly, I felt some anxiety at how they described the language of No President. “It’s offensive to everybody, women, Jews, Muslims, it’s like everybody’s attacked, ourselves, everything,” Pavol said, and I expected the worst, counted the offences off on my fingers: the orientalism, the dilute accusations of anti-Semitism, the haircut described as halal. But there is a playground ebullience to No President that made offence much less present to me than when I’ve witnessed – this is all in recent weeks – teenagers in London denouncing someone as gay, or overheard a white guy on a train through Essex declaring this country ruined because woke lefties have made it impossible to say anything.

Is that confirmation bias, to be disturbed by one and not the other? Again, I think that questioning is part of the point. On the one hand, we’re living in a culture of polarisation: sure, the fascists are wrong, but their narrative has ploughed into the mainstream, and a woolly leftie fretting about the word barrage is doing nothing to change that. On the other hand, this rethinking of language “is not an intellectual aberration that has burst upon us, but part of a long ideological and political struggle that goes back to the abolition of slavery and decolonisation and is connected to the rise of feminism, anti-racism and multiculturalism”. That’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, from an essay on the backlash against political correctness – wokeness, that is, the 1990s edition. Political correctness, Alibhai-Brown argued, brought “a real shake-up in the power relationship” of society, resulting in a massive scale backlash so successful we’re still having the exact same arguments, thirty years later.

An element of that argument, specific to theatre, is the place of hierarchy in the rehearsal room. Arguably, the real figure of power in No President isn’t on the stage but in the bodies of Pavol and Kelly, both present for every performance. “As much as anything,” says Pavol, “I’m exploring my own dark side and the dynamics of power in rehearsal. I have no desire for power, I would love for everything to happen on its own.” But theatre isn’t magic, however much it projects illusion, and the reality, says Kelly, is that “at the very lowest level, I couldn’t do what I do without people being willing participants and giving everything that they give us. So there’s a kind of humility along with the power trip or whatever of what we do.”

That so-called power trip results in a number of decisions that make (some) audiences actively uncomfortable: not just the interminable narration and the scenes of human dismemberment, cannibalism, etc, but the lack of interval and with it, no “comfort break” (what a euphemism that is). “What we’re always doing, with all the shows,” says Kelly, “is pushing discomfort to the point where something breaks, like the moustache falls off or the actors can’t keep singing or keep standing. Something is revealed, which is our humanity and the patheticness of us trying to deal with all these things, and I don’t know the answers, and help me.”

The thing that gets broken in No President, I think, is the concept of civilisation, and with it language as the tool that humans use to set themselves apart from other animals. I listened out for variations on the word – civil, civilised – but don’t remember hearing any; and yet civilisation is the pervasive, invisible power in the show, the white supremacist notion of civilisation that resulted in genocide for indigenous Americans, in enslavement of African peoples, in colonialism, segregation, a democracy of constitutional inequality.

After making No President, before the second Trump election, Kelly and Pavol decided to travel the US as bikers, an experience Kelly describes as “so confronting. People assume when you ride a motorcycle that you have a certain kind of political … they talk to you, they tell you what they think, because they think you’re one of them.” The pair were shocked and shocked again by the country’s divisions: the racism (Pavol: “segregation is not over, the civil war is not over by any means”) and the poverty. Kelly remembers one place in East Cleveland where “there was no food anywhere, just pawn shops, liquor stores, dialysis centres, gas stations and that’s it. It’s a food desert and the people who are living there are not doing well. But it used to be the millionaire’s row, the Carnegies are buried there, this was the heart of industrial wealth, created by the steel magnates, and it’s crazy how impoverished it is. They lost their last four mayors to corruption, it’s been fucked over in major, major ways.” Another place, Elaine, Arkansas, turned out to be the site of a massacre in 1919: 120 African-American sharecroppers, organising against tenant farming, murdered in less than three days. “Some of them had served in the military in the first world war, they were becoming much more careful about their rights. And the white people didn’t like that they were ‘getting uppity’,” says Kelly. “How could I live in this country and just not know?”

No President “came out of us trying to process Trumpism”, says Pavol: not Trump, one man taking power, but the -ism, the shape and flow of people behind him. The, let’s say, lower power of almost 63 million people who voted for him in 2016, more than 77 million who voted for him in 2024. And the higher power of what Carole Cadwalladr calls the broligarchy: the manipulators of tech, psychology, populism, who propagandised those votes, who surf waves of fascism, regardless of the harm that results. The language they use, the violence of it, the histories forgotten, the gaslighting. The freedom (to call for social justice) that’s lost as freedom (to reinforce hierarchy) is asserted again, again, again.

‘dance back into their communal dream’

Even as self-appointed president, Mikey is still Mikey. An actor, as well as a pretext. An out-of-work actor responsible for a theatre curtain, an object of value – he’s told, although no one has explained exactly how. Is it the curtain itself that’s valuable? The hidden thing behind it? A mystery.

There’s an almost bullying quality to the way in which theatre-makers are teased in this show. “Mikey and Georgie feel self-conscious, probably the worst emotion to feel on stage.” “The worst you can do to Mikey, the consummate actor, deny him attention.” “Boring – the absolute worst insult for any performer.” Are these repetitions deliberate? Probably: it feels like a comment on self-dramatisation. “His unflagging devotion to the cult of Stanislavsky produces real tears.” “The grieving process turns into a powerful one-man show.” The first night I watched No President (because yes, I am the person who watched it twice within the three days), the build-up of these in-jokes resulted in me absolutely losing it on the powerful one-man show, eyes flooding with laughter tears.

Here’s my theory – although theory is an absurdly grandiose word for it: Pavol and Kelly make theatre for people who have a problem with theatre, because they themselves are people who have a problem with theatre. Or maybe two problems. Firstly, a problem with theatre as artifice, as entertainment, as heightened emotion; a problem I encountered myself in my late 20s, which resulted in me seeing almost no theatre for four years. I loop again and again to a similar origin story for OKT: how Pavol and Kelly left theatre in their late 20s only to come back, with a furious intent to make theatre that is messy, challenging, that misbehaves. Recently I found a pdf online of an article by Kelly reminiscing on this journey: as a student, a tutor told her that “the only reason to make performance is to change the world and that if we want anything less we should just fuck off”. Some of her fellow students “think he’s an asshole. I smoke everything he says like crack.” (Again, hard relate.)

This question of how to change the world, with theatre, on limited funds, is the second problem Pavol and Kelly have and might be the piston heart of No President. Another thing I loop back to repeatedly is Pavol’s upbringing in communist Czechoslovakia before the Velvet Revolution, one of whose leaders, Vaclav Havel, was also a playwright and part of the dissident theatre culture there. But Pavol has been trying to make big, ambitious, ensemble, dissident theatre in a capitalist context where art is expected to perform in the marketplace, in a country that intensely dislikes the words ensemble, dissident and, to be honest, theatre. And what do you do when the thing you devote your life to breaks you and might break you again? I don’t use those words lightly: in 2012, says Kelly, “we got to a place where Pavol had a kind of physical and nervous breakdown in Hamburg and ended up in the hospital”. They were trying to make new episodes of their gargantuan, arguably over-ambitious, defiantly ensemble work Life and Times; listening back to recordings of Pavol at work from the weeks running up to his hospitalisation, Kelly says, “I should have heard, he’s right on the brink, he cares so much.”

Since then they’ve tried to rebalance the care, even as the cultural scales have tilted further against them. Kelly again: “Theatres in Europe are having to more tightly focus on local artists. Nobody wants to fly people, it’s unenvironmental. In New York, we’ve got nothing: they’ve even rescinded some of the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] grants and they want to make grantees sign something to say they won’t have any kind of agenda about race or gender. We’re working with the most censorship – and self-censorship – that we’ve ever had.” The set for No President carries all of that: huge flat boards either side of the stage, painted like an ancient castle, mouldy, dilapidated, a fantasy world that feels outdated, nothing relevant about it, clinging to its former status, which was always flimsy, always at the border of collapse.

The world does physically change at the end of the show: the curtain opens, revealing a front-lit stage, so the space seems to recede into infinite depth. Here Mikey and Georgie, miraculously reunited, dance their little downtime choreography, “dance back into their communal dream”. No budget. No drama. No language. Just connection, collaboration, two bodies together, making movement, making something move. Does it make up for all the violence we’ve seen? No. As a vision of socialist revolution, is it enough? No. Can it even be valued? No – and maybe that’s the point. What happens there is quiet, tender, basically pointless, just two regular guys dancing their love for each other, for this weird and messy and tough, so tough, experience of being alive. Basically pointless and entirely necessary to survival.

If this is something I already think and know, that art is what expands our capacity as humans, that culture, at its least competitive and most collaborative, is what separates us from vultures, where is the transformation? If you’d asked me that immediately after seeing the show, I’m not sure I could have answered. With a few weeks of reflection, what I find myself thinking about is the capacity for endurance. To keep looking at acts of violence, however cartoonish, absurd, to keep listening to the 1,887,550 words (I forgot one: oblations), to keep giving attention, keep connecting, keep thinking. I wrote this while reading Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, which I highly recommend as a dose of healing medicine; in her concluding chapter, Kaba writes of the impulse to turn away from the news, “to ignore what’s happening in the world, stay in bed, and watch the Hallmark Channel”, and because she is wise and kind she says this is OK sometimes, but that it is also important “to resist numbness … to stay interested in the stories of people who are suffering under the current regime. To turn away from that suffering is tacit complicity with current systems of violence. It is getting used to harm.”

Kelly and Pavol refuse to get used to harm: they make art that (Kelly’s words) “mimics the shape of the actual world, which is a broken thing and an evil thing sometimes”, art that insists on having “a relationship to the world that I’m living in, which is so much messier and more ugly” than it often appears on stage. They do this because, in the (Kaba’s words) “active refusal to become numb to the horror” is the possibility “for change and transformation to occur”. The possibility for pulling back the curtain, for dancing a different dance, to a different tune, towards a different way to be.