ROTUS review: proximity to power, polished to a fault
★ ★ ★ ⯨ Leigh Douglas’s one-woman satire grips the room, even when its ideas stop short of their sharpest edge
She arrives already complete: hair bleached to the edge of plausibility, smile polished to broadcast reassurance, voice pitched somewhere between a TikTok pep talk and a Sunday sermon. Chastity Quirke knows exactly who she is — and exactly how she wants to be read. An all-American girl by design, carefully calibrated to flatter power. Not intimidatingly beautiful, but deliberately pretty, safe, and — more importantly — useful. She even calls herself insufferable, cheerfully, as if pre-empting criticism were another form of control.
The play charts Chastity’s progression from a small-town background to a junior role on the edge of American power, stationed just outside the Oval Office — a position she enthusiastically rebrands as ROTUS, receptionist of the United States. She treats proximity as leverage, carrying with her a worldview shaped by fashionable patriotism, aggressive optimism and scripture. Her belief that usefulness will protect her proves misplaced: by the end, she is deliberately sacrificed to keep that power intact.
Leigh Douglas, who also wrote the piece, holds the room with ease and rarely misjudges a moment — even in the cheerleader routines and polished pirouettes. Her Chastity is alert, responsive, precise. She watches the audience carefully, sustains eye contact, and draws them into moments that might otherwise falter. When, smiling like an aerobics instructor from the 1980s, she invites the audience to scream if they want to “make America hot again”, the response arrives unevenly — a laugh here, a shout there — before gathering force.Douglas’s control occasionally tips into excess. A musical number, confidently delivered and technically assured, showcases her vocal range but unsettles the tone. It feels less like an escalation than a flourish — impressive in itself, but arriving where the material might have benefited from restraint.
Religion functions as another credential: a cheerleading routine set to ‘Jesus loves us every day’, faith slotting neatly alongside other slogans, another box ticked in the construction of Chastity’s persona. Much of the work comes from charm, part of which lies in smoothing her super-short black dress, adjusting her posture and pussy bow, occasionally flashing a glimpse of red knickers, and managing attention with care. It is labour here, and men respond immediately, easing her ascent.
Their trust arrives in increments. A congressman hands her a Whole Foods bag stuffed with classified documents and tells her to burn them, as casually as if passing on groceries. There is the boyfriend — ambitious, interchangeable — whose career she quietly undermines to prove loyalty further up the chain. Around them drift the office men: senior, complacent, faintly lecherous, content to linger at her desk, accept her attentiveness, and move on.
The women operate under different pressures. Over toilet breaks they compare notes: who is drinking what, who is trying to get pregnant before thirty, who is already running out of time. Candice, the most senior among them, oscillates between hardened insider and aspirational trad-wife-in-waiting, a contradiction the play sketches without resolving.
The staging is sparse — a desk, a rolling chair — but Douglas animates the space with quick shifts of posture and voice. Male figures sag or leer; ambitious women sharpen. A running voiceover adds retrospective commentary, lending the piece a faint Sex and the City gloss, if Carrie Bradshaw had swapped columns for TikTok and Manhattan for MAGA.
The writing is strongest early on, when surface and satire are allowed to do the same work. As the play progresses, the performance continues to sharpen, but the script begins to rely on repetition rather than development. Slogans return where argument might have followed, and moments that hint at a darker analysis are left hanging.
The turning point comes when loyalty begins to look lethal. Chastity is warned, quietly and urgently, that the errands she has been trusted with are not just illegal but expendable. She understands, for the first time, that her usefulness includes her removal. Douglas marks the shift carefully: the smile tightens, the breath shortens, the assurance drains away.
What the play offers less of is the space between understanding and consequence. Chastity barely has time to process that she may be part of an assassination plot, let alone decide what to do with that knowledge. Before any reckoning can settle, she is shot, crawling across the floor, physically diminished.The image is stark, but the route to it feels rushed.
By the end, Chastity is reduced to survival. Whether anything deeper has shifted is left unresolved. Has belief cracked, or has it simply been overtaken by fear? Douglas captures the peril of mistaking usefulness for protection with precision, even if the play denies its protagonist — and its audience — the time to fully absorb the cost.
ROTUS: RECEPTIONIST OF THE UNITED STATES
Dates:20 January to 7 February 2026
Venue: Park Theatre, Finsbury Park
Duration: 70 minutes
Tickets: £15 – £25
Age guidance 16+
Tickets : Park Theatre Website
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
