A QUEEN WHO NEEDED QUEENS
The curtain rises on the Clarence House garden room in 1979, where the Queen Mother held her eccentric little court. Much gilding, unreasonably many oil paintings of roses, and a tail-coated Billy Tallon, newly promoted as Page of the Backstairs and staff boss, pointing military-style as he orders his colleagues where to deposit the morning’s vasefuls of real flowers. “Rosewood. Occasional, Sideboard, Plinth, Plinth”. Luke Evans’ Billy is posher than posh as he informs little Gwdion, a newcomer, of the duties and demeanour of a footman: always remain standing, be correct, never cross the grand rug but go round it. Noses pressed to the glass, we gaze into royal-world: hardly was the curtain up when two corgis scampered across the stage, to be met with a rousing cheer and traditional British cries of awwwww!
In The Audience – the last major stage-royal imagining – there was only one live corgi moment, but director Michael Grandage hedges his bets and has three. The final one even involves HM – Penelope Wilton – in cuddling a rather reluctant and spirited dog on the sofa while possibly – no spoilers – deciding whether to sack her favourite after 27 years. Billy deserves it, after bringing a pick-up male prostitute (Eloka Ivo) into the building with chaotically improper results of the sort it would be better that her daughter the Queen never heard of. And the Queen Mother knows that getting rid of Tallon would delight her Private Secretary (Ian Drysdale). In a tricky moment of strikes and riots and a crashing economy pre-Thatcher, he wants to rein in the prodigal extravagance of the octogenarian mini-court.
It’s a promising theme Marcelo Dos Santos has in this new play, and often it’s full of fun: in her years of widowhood HM – despite keeping up a reasonable number of cheerful public appearances – was famously fond of a tipple and a dance (she was once found singing My Old Man’s a Dustman at the piano with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster). We are given two scenes of her teatime entertaining, to great comic effect: one mixes a dim actress from her favourite soap (Emily Barber) with a patriotically starstruck couple described by Billy as a “couple of Home Counties cadavers” (Michael Simkins and Nicola Sloane). The other has the same players as dopey aristocrats, thrown by the reappearance of Eloka Ivo’s prostitute masquerading as an African prince. Wilton is a dream, handling the curious royal mixture of impertinence and optimistic charm in bizarre exchanges with these visitors; the satire is less on royalty itself than on the peculiar tongue-tied behaviour of British people dealing with it face to face. Especially back in the grander days of fifty years ago.
All good fun, though with rather more Carry-on-Gay jokes than necessary, but there is a frustrating sense that inside this play there is a rather better one trying to get out. That better play is not just a farce of mistaken-identity and sauciness with a two-minute dash of 1979 politics, but a portrait of a real and necessary human relationship between mistress and servant. It flashes into view sometimes amid the farcical daftness. Luke Evans is a convincingly devoted Billy, amusing HM with his camp flair, devotion and willingness to dance round the sofa with her, but he needs her as much as she needs him, and he unravels satisfactorily when he gets himself into trouble. In a flashbacks we meet his 15 year old self (Ilan Galkoff) who came to Ma’am’s service in her early widowhood.
As for Penelope Wilton, she is deeply touching: we see her in a timeshift as a new widow in 1952, glad to chat to the new little page (“fifteen? Are we resorting to kidnapping?”) . How can she make a new life without her Bertie, and her Palace home and job? Then back in 1979 we see her suddenly as just a mother, cut off from daily cosiness by her eldest daughter’s new job and grandeur and being stood up by a neglectful Margaret who asked herself to breakfast then didn’t turn up. When that happens Wilton turns to the wall for a silent moment of rage, while Billy stands sympathetically by. She then turns back to paste on a smile and a determination not to join in any feeling that is “dour and doomy”, but to have another drink and get on with whatever leisure-centre ribbon-cutting awaits her.
And in one other extraordinary moment when that other play struggles to get out, she responds with wounded kindness to a slightly demented contemporary who forgets that Bertie, the King her husband , has been dead for nearly thirty years. “It makes no sense’ says mad old Lady Adeline. “No sense at all” says HM, gently, after a tense silent beat. And Wilton at that moment is the great actress she is: real, all there, grieving still, anxious not to hurt.
Box office. www.michaelgrandagecompany.com. to. 27 Jan
NB MGC productions does work to offer cheap tickets: £10 tickets available at every performance across the run. For further information, and to register for the initiative: www.michaelgrandagecompany.com.
rating. 4 but only JUST, and it was Wilton wot won it. And the reluctant sofa-corgi.
theatreCat 