Modern parallels in royal power struggle
Outspoken actress and self-styled “ticking grenade of gender anger” Romola Garai complained recently in a newspaper interview that if “a theatre runs mostly plays by men, directed by men and starring men, what else can it be but misogyny?” Yet the production she’s lending her name, her fame and her talent to at the Haymarket – Helen Edmundson’s portrait of the last of the Stuarts, in which she stars as the queen’s scheming best friend, Sarah Churchill – hardly suggests there’s some hateful male conspiracy afoot.
Commercial producers have taken a risk bringing an intricate play about an under-known, relatively obscure period of British history to the heart of the West End.
That it was championed by critics, myself included, at the RSC in Stratford when it opened in 2015 attests to the appetite that most of us have for well-dramatised stories about women; we just need more of them, and this could, potentially, be a golden age for such writing.
If I can’t cheer quite as loudly as I did at the premiere, that’s a basic consequence of the piece looking a touch over-exposed – and with top-price seats at £105, it’s certainly over-priced – in this theatrical palace, which dates back to the Hanoverian era that Queen Anne, with its simmering preoccupation with the succession, anticipates. Natalie Abrahami, the director, could usefully instruct the ensemble to bellow their lines a bit more: it’s a long way up to the gallery.
Yet even if the evening isn’t quite the hot ticket that, say, The Ferryman is – nor matches the Restoration-era ebullience of Jessica Swale’s recent Nell
Gwynn, albeit that it features entertainingly bawdy rounds of scurrilous, satirical song – it still fascinates. And it throws up uncanny modern parallels too, in showing the monarch dismayed by party political in-fighting, contemplating stretched national finances, and shuddering at potentially hazardous isolation from the Continent (the European balance of power being fought over in the War of the Spanish Succession). Oh, and there’s the union with Scotland too.
Emma Cunniffe reprises her mesmerising turn as pale, dejected Anne, beset by leg sores, worn by multiple miscarriages and the deaths of several children at a very young age, almost amorously dependent, initially, on her more vivacious bosom-buddy, Churchill (the pair call each other Mrs Freeman and Mrs Morley) but slowly transforming before our eyes: shedding her meekness to become “mother to a nation”, and sloughing off the toxic mantle of Churchill’s controlling (Whig-oriented) ways.
It’s worth seeing for her performance alone, but Garai is terrific too, if lacking in redemptive warmth, as the imperious, two-faced power behind the throne, edged out of favour, in a real-life twist, by her impoverished cousin, Abigail Hill (Beth Park). In the closing, almost Shakespearean scene of rejection, Garai brilliantly combines ebbing poise, suppressed panic and steely defiance. Next stop, a deserved transfer to film?
Until Sept 30. Tickets: 020 7930 8800; trh.co.uk