AT THE back of the cigar-rolling room in which Steven Knight’s play is set is a large, antique fan. It turns and turns, but so sedately that it might be better suited to propelling an ultra-slow boat to China than cooling workers who, judging by their faces, are anyway more used to English than Cuban weather. There were several times when I felt it summed up The President of an Empty Room.
Knight wrote the award-winning screenplay of Dirty Pretty Things but, on the evidence of his National Theatre debut, has much to learn about the stage. Even Howard Davies, as accomplished a director as we possess, fails to inject enough heat and momentum into a piece whose problem may be that the key event is occurring offstage.
One of the cigar-rolling desks is empty because its usual occupant, Alexandra, is sneaking by sea from Cuba to Florida. Will she beat the storm that passed through Havana last night? It’s a question that doesn’t just preoccupy her heroin-addicted lover, Paul Hilton’s Miguel, and Jim Carter as the “cigar-taster” who may and may not be her father.
The “head of company morale and worker wellbeing”, Noma Dumezweni’s Albina, has been consulting a 1,000-year-old witch whose voodoo will surely keep any boat afloat.
Towards the end there are revelations and a few excitements, but not enough to galvanise a piece that drags and lacks focus. Knight clearly wants to evoke the feel of a shabby yet resilient Cuba, a “tiny ulcer in the belly of America” which will, he implies, turn into another US province after Castro’s death. In a sly comment on the nation’s contradictions, Miguel proclaims the cigar factory a democracy and himself its president, an all-powerful boss who “will fire anyone who calls me boss”.
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And with Alexandra’s dead or living spirit making the odd appearance, even Cuba’s atheists half-believe that voodoo is what the word apparently means, “truth”. With Albina sexually servicing Anthony O’Donnell as the wheelchair-bound veteran of one of Cuba’s foreign adventures, there is the odd quirky moment, as well as some sharpish dialogue and decent acting. How could it be otherwise when the cast includes Stephen Moore as a bitter old communist as well as Hilton, Carter and O’Donnell? But the characterisation is pretty cursory — and the play itself not a lot more fun than a Fidel speech.