Queen Anne

Playwright: Helen Edmundson Director: Natalie Abrahami

Theatre Royal Haymarket, 18 Suffolk Street, London SW1 (020-7930 8800) Until 30 September

Running time: 2hrs 30mins (including interval)

In summer, West End audiences are traditionally served up “liberal helpings of benign bunkum”, said Fiona Mountford in the London Evening Standard. How refreshing, then, to be offered this “intelligent hit play” from the RSC. First seen in Stratford in 2015, Queen Anne is a “rich and satisfying new drama” focused on two “meaty female central characters” – the last Stuart monarch and her ambitious confidante, Sarah Churchill – a “welcome corrective” to the male bias inherent in the company’s core diet of Shakespeare. It’s a “rare pleasure”, agreed Michael Billington in The Guardian, to see a history play centred on the “gripping” power struggle between two determined women. You have to go back to Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart, or Robert Bolt’s Vivat! Vivat Regina!, to find anything comparable.

There’s certainly a lot of history to get through, said Sarah Hemming in the FT: the rise of two-party politics; the War of the Spanish Succession, the union of England and Scotland, the rise of popular journalism as a power in the land. At times this complex background does make the play a bit “dense and slow moving”, but for the most part, Helen Edmundson makes “light work of it”, while Natalie Abrahami’s “sprightly” production revels in both “the comedy and the cut and thrust”. Emma Cunniffe brilliantly reprises her “mesmerising turn” as “pale, dejected” Anne, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Romola Garai is “terrific too, if lacking in redemptive warmth” as Anne’s bosom buddy Churchill, the “imperious, two-faced power behind the throne”. The supporting cast are also great.

From time to time, the play’s content has political parallels with today – Scotland and Brexit – which raise “knowing laughs” from the audience, said Ann Treneman in The Times. But, oh goodness, it does all “feel a bit worthy”; a history lesson with some “fun scenes” thrown in. It’s a very “bitty” play, and the staging (doors open and close with “alarming frequency”) gives it a “jerky” quality. “There should be passion and pain here, as well as politics, but we don’t feel it.”