ROMPING ROYALTY
her life by Helen Mirren in The Queen. Like the latter film, A Royal Night Out offers a fantasy version of the current monarch, a wittier, smarter, more likeably vulnerable creature except that in this story she’s bridling against the establishment, incarnated by mother Queen Elizabeth (Emily Watson) and father King George VI (a near-unrecognizable Rupert Everett), instead of trying to uphold it as she does in the overrated Stephen Frears film.
Screenwriters Trevor De Silva and Kevin Hood’s very-looselybased-on-a-few-facts script posits Elizabeth and Margaret in 1945 as young Rapunzels trapped in their ivory tower, who just want to go out and join the throng outside Buckingham Palace’s gates. Mum doesn’t want them to, but gentlerhearted dad thinks it might be a good chance to find out what the people think of the speech he’s planning to broadcast to the nation (not the same speech that climaxes the end of The King’s Speech). They’re allowed to go incognito (a footman suggests Margaret lose the tiara because “it rather gives the game away”) to the Ritz, as long as they’re accompanied by soldiers (Jack Laskey and Jack Gordon) as chaperones and back no later than 1am.
It’s as foreseeable as the certainty that a tower of champagne glasses seen at one point will get smashed to the ground that the girls won’t get home before their curfew. First Margaret gives the soldiers the slip, and Elizabeth, ever the sensible one, sets off after