In 1969 Donald Freed’s first play, Inquest, an exploration of the Rosenberg spy case, prompted the FBI to open a file on the Chicago-born writer, director and activist. It’s unlikely that his latest work will improve his popularity with the authorities in the country from which he is a voluntary exile.

Set in 2010, Patient No 1 finds a post-presidential George W. Bush confined to an exclusive Florida mental hospital. There, with a liberal psychiatrist and a taciturn besuited secret service minder, Bush unravels, while outside a violent tempest gathers force, redolent of the shock and awe of his White House years and of the humanitarian disaster and political disgrace of Hurricane Katrina.

But rather than being an opportunity to mock the much-derided Dubya, Freed’s play, premiering at York Theatre Royal where the author is writer in residence, confronts its audience with a suggestion of wider culpability in what the Land of the Free has become. Inspired by a quote by the poet Walt Whitman, it posits the allegorical notion that an entire nation, and not just its elected leader, has gone mad.

A wretched Bush, drugged and shambling in slippers and surgical gown, is, Freed’s Doctor contends, both the puppet of a sinister right-wing elite and a convenient bogeyman for the Left. Focusing on a scapegoat lets society off the moral hook, and Freed cites the rise of Nazism as a parallel to the lack of vigorous resistance to the escalation of Republican warmongering and the erosion of freedoms.

In dealing with the former president, the Doctor insists on remaining civilised, on seeking to heal rather than to hurt. As he coaxes confessions from his patient, biographical details add texture. We see the legacy of Bush Sr and his son’s eagerness to please him in the younger Bush’s bellicosity; the sadistic initiation rituals performed by his Yale fraternity are echoed in the humiliations of Abu Ghraib.

But while Freed’s central image is potent, the play itself is more an intellectual hypothesis – albeit a passionate one – than a drama. The underwritten characters give Jon Farris as the Doctor, Robert Pickavance as the Patient and Jonathan Race as the Security Agent little to work with – a shortcoming emphasised by Damian Cruden’s production, which lacks intensity and pace. The sheer strength of feeling in Freed’s writing has real force; a pity it’s not matched by powerful theatricality.

Box office: 01904 623 568, to May 17 2008. Mercury Theatre, Colchester, May 19-24 2008

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