Rotus: Receptionist of the United States review – spiky Maga satire with a seriously funny star

This show arrives in London in a week that US politics couldn’t be more inescapable. While on one hand, audiences may feel that there’s only so much Trumpian lunacy they can take, it also means that newcomer Leigh Douglas’s satirical one-woman show – which had a sold-out run at the Edinburgh fringe last year – couldn’t feel more timely.

The Irish-born, American-raised comic plays Chastity Quirke, a sorority girl turned White House receptionist working for president Ronald Drumpf, whose administration is highly sexist (and other “ists” besides). She begins the show with a fervour for conservatism and a love of Maga-style beauty standards, requesting that the audience scream if they believe in “[making] America hot again”, and gyrating suggestively whenever she gets the chance.

Chastity isn’t, she insists, merely here to be “window dressing for the Drumpf administration”, and sees herself as a crucial part of his operation. But a disembodied narrator – also in Chastity’s voice – hints at trouble to come. Drumpf, we learn, plans to unlawfully stay in office past two terms. Chastity is privy to his plot, but will she do as she is told and quietly burn the incriminating documents that her boss has secreted in a Whole Foods carrier bag?

Douglas is a seriously funny performer who plays not just Chastity but an array of side characters in this 70-minute show, ably directed by Fiona Kingwill. For Drumpf’s men, she leans into bad posture and lecherous gazes, while the women are largely sprightly and coquettish, and the sparse set never feels too limited to bend to each new personage.

While great fun at first, however, it slowly runs out of juice. As we teeter unevenly towards the end of the show, the gags become less biting and the lines more broad, among them a take on the oft-quoted poem First They Came by Martin Niemöller, about apathy in the face of nazism (“First they came for the immigrant families”, laments Chastity, “and I said nothing, ’cause I wanted the boys to like me”).

The show ends tensely and abruptly, blunting its spikier moments of satire. Still, there is much to appreciate here, and Douglas and Kingwill have nailed what makes Maga women tick: not just a yearning to be pretty, but a lust for power too.