A royal lack of concentration
The Audience Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto
The Audience stands, in Peter Morgan’s r oyalist oeuvre, between The Queen and The Crown, not perhaps the safest place to be. At any rate, this stage piece lacks both the concentration of the film, which focused on the death of Princess Diana, and the capaciousness of the TV show, the first season of which has only taken us as far as the eve of Suez. The Audience is a set of duologues: guesswork reconstructions of the weekly briefings of Elizabeth II by eight of her thirteen- to- date prime ministers, the most surprising of the absentees being Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath and the most understandable — because the play was written before her elevation — Theresa May.
They aren’ t presented chronologically; rather, the play jumps around in time. This deprives The Audience’s audience, not to mention its leading actress, of any sense of dramatic development. The format also means that there’s no room for the queen’s inner or domestic life. In The Crown, these ingredients mix with the politics to provide compelling drama. The TV Elizabeth may or may not resemble the real woman (though she certainly sounds like her), but she’s a real person on the screen. Lacking this scaffolding, the play becomes glorified gossip while Fiona Reid in the lead is reduced, initially at least, to just doing the voice. But she rallies. As always, she deals perfectly with the good lines that come her way (one being “that started out as a compliment but ended somewhere else”), while the performance gets deeper as her character ages.
Like the actors in Crow’s Theatre’s The Wedding Party, she has a lot of costume changes, but hers are covered by her chatting from just beyond our sight to her younger pre- monarchical self; exchanges that reek of contrivance. Even worse is having an offstage chorus moan “Suez! Suez!” when Anthony Eden mentions the fatal canal. If that’s in the text, a director with Christopher Newton’s taste and intelligence should have cut it. There’s also a needless coronation sequence.
Still, the assorted PMs are a fine character- actorly bunch. Top of the crop is Kate Hennig, whose Margaret Thatcher scores high as both creation and impersonation. Her meeting with the queen, who plainly dislikes her, strikes more sparks than anything else on stage. The one she does like, or so we are literally told, is Harold Wilson, who in Nigel Bennett’s salt- of- the- north performance, is certainly a more endearing figure than the one I remember. Then we have Benedict Campbell’s downright Gordon Brown and Paul Essiembre’s gaunt Eden, each battling their own physical demons; John B. Lowe, gamely contending with John Lithgow as a Churchill whose scene was partly recycled for The Crown; Kevin Klassen’s Tony Blair, getting easy rueful laughs when he talks about democratizing Iraq; Evan Buliung almost unrecognizable as a John Major drawn in more delicate detail than most of his mates; and, bringing up the rear, Ben Carlson, a David Cameron whose crisp timing matches that of his sovereign.
Perhaps it’s the fact that she’s constitutionally powerless that makes most of the encounters seem pleasant rather than urgent. They are linked by an Equerry who fills us in on the decorative details that we aren’t allowed to see for ourselves, which is most of them; Anthony Bekenn does these honours, and does them honourably.
The Audience runs until Feb. 26.