Toronto’s fascination with royals manifests in theatre
But allure really comes from exploring inclusivity, history playwright Kate Hennig says
Check the New York Times travel section or your free Parks Canada pass: 2017 is the year of Canada 150.
A century and a half has passed since the British North America Act in 1867, by which our country gained sovereignty from Britain. But we haven’t lost our fascination with our former rulers, or at least that’s what Toronto stages are telling us right now.
This week, Mirvish Productions opens The Audience at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. Peter Morgan’s play depicting Queen Elizabeth II’s reign from 1952 to the present through her audiences with various prime ministers is highly anticipated. Directed by former Shaw Festival artistic director Christopher Newton, it features Fiona Reid as Britain’s monarch.
East of Yonge St., Soulpepper Theatre is also taking on a royal drama with The Last Wife, a contemporary retelling by Kate Hennig of the tale of King Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Katherine Parr (the only one to survive him).
This production brings together the cast that premiered the play at the Stratford Festival in 2015, where it sold out even before rehearsals began. This summer, Hennig’s sequel, The Virgin Trial, will also appear at the festival.
Adding to the royal confluence is the blockbuster Netflix series The Crown (another Morgan project, partly inspired by The Audience), which just won two Golden Globes.
We could thank Will and Kate for this resurgence in Canada’s royal obsession, but if you ask Hennig, there’s a deeper reason.
“There is a real trend to allow history to be more inclusive,” she says over the phone, on break from rehearsing The Audience in which she plays former British PM Margaret Thatcher. She cites Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton as the biggest example of this.
“What’s really compelling me now is the idea that women get to speak their own history, and that people of any colour and culture get to own that history if they are Canadian or British or American. If our culture is going to be inclusive, then our history must be as well. I think that’s also why we’ve got The Crown on TV, because we want to know Elizabeth. Women are interested in hearing their perspective in history,” she says.
Inspired by the shifting power dynamics she witnessed during the Arab Spring, Hennig didn’t set out to write a play about royals, she intended to write a play about tyranny.
That brought her to Henry VIII and the discovery of the character of Katherine Parr, “the queen-maker”: a well-educated, intelligent writer and educator who brought Henry’s two banished daughters, Elizabeth (Bess in the play) and Mary, back into the royal lineage.
The Virgin Trial will focus on charges of treason against Bess; the third in the trilogy, Father’s Daughter, will involve the story of Mary, known commonly as “Bloody Mary” for her persecution of Protestants. Hennig says she could go on from there.
“The more you read the more you write.”
Neither Maev Beaty, who plays Kate (Katherine), or Bahia Watson, who plays Bess, had a pointed interest in the British royals before taking on their historical roles — though Beaty once bought her mother a set of Christmas ornaments of Henry VIII and his wives, and Watson’s mother grew up in the British area of Guyana.
Fortunately, Hennig’s contemporary setting of this 1800s story freed it from becoming too much of a period drama and, instead, something we can learn from today.
“Yes, this is a historical biography through (Hennig’s) perspective, but it’s also an exploration of power, patriarchy, the human heart and survival,” Beaty says. And the contemporary resonances in Katherine’s story — a capable and intelligent woman navigating around a blustery, fiery-tempered and allpowerful man — aren’t easy to miss.
“I would give my left leg to be able to go to the Women’s March on Washington, but we can’t because we’re doing a show. But if I can’t be there, I can’t imagine being in a better place than doing this play at this time,” Beaty says.
“And I think we all know why, in this play about a blond woman who doesn’t get to be king. Whereas before I may have felt more responsibility to do right by Katherine Parr, I feel a greater responsibility now to do right by the questions in the play in a very contemporary and urgent moment.”
Brexit, the election of Trump and so-called “Canadian values” are adding new resonance to The Last Wife and The Audience. In fact, The Last Wife had its American premiere in Chicago from September to December 2016, spanning from the euphoria of an anticipated female president to the breathtaking post-election letdown.
“We were talking about how my play would become obsolete really because we were going to see a woman get to the place she deserved to be,” Hennig says, noting that Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre purposefully programmed The Last Wife with Hillary Clinton’s election in mind. Actor Steve Pickering, who played Henry VIII, “said to me, he could feel the rage in the audience the next day.”
Watson says the ripple effects of British colonialism means that increasingly intercultural societies won’t become less interested in the British royals; on the other hand, our relationship to them will become even more complex. And the process of filling in historical gaps will remind us that the fight for equality is longer than we think and that Clinton is not the first woman to suffer such setbacks.
“It feels like we’re going back in history and we’re bringing it with us,” she says. “Where we were invisible we’re putting ourselves back in and allowing that to empower our history and our present selves; that steps have been taken and also taken away. There’s something ancient in that.”
See soulpepper.ca or call 416-8668666 for tickets to The Last Wife. See mirvish.com or call 416-872-1212 for tickets to The Audience. Carly Maga is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinee column with critic Karen Fricker.