Party like it’s 1945
A nervy Princess Elizabeth and a much flirtier Margaret the town for VE Day in this mischievous regal romcom
A ROYAL NIGHT OUT Cert 12A, 87 mins
HOW exciting it must be to be a true monarchist! I don’t mean a feeble monarchist like me, who has such a horror of the concept of there ever being a President Blair that I am delighted to have instead a constitutional monarch, who should ideally be as little personally interesting as possible, an heraldic beast in effect, a role our dear Queen has carried out so perfectly for so long now, with only that disturbing penchant for corgis standing out as a black mark against her. I mean a true believer in hereditary monarchy, even the divine right of kings, like the author of Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, Sir Robert Filmer (15881653), or Peter Andre, the self-harming royal obsessive in Little Britain.
How thrilling, then, any contact with the royal family would be! What a sense of identity and belonging one would have! Few of us can have such pure belief any more. Yet the fascination lingers on, even if for many it’s like enjoying ghost stories despite not believing in ghosts. Tom Hooper’s brilliant 2011 film, The King’s Speech, played so artfully on that feeling of an ordinary man getting close to such majesty, helping His Royal Highness out, enjoying a surprise visit to the humble home even. That closed with King George VI’s speech of September 1939 announcing the outbreak of war. A Royal Night Out, in which he announces its end, is a comedy coda to The King’s Speech, a deliberate pitch to that audience, carried out with genuine brio.
Seventy years ago today, on VE Day, May 8, 1945, Princess Elizabeth, then 19, and Princess Margaret, 14, were allowed out from Buckingham Palace, in a party of 16 equerries and officers, to join the crowds celebrating the end of what Churchill still called “the German War” in the streets. They danced the conga and the hokey cokey, they went up to Piccadilly and into the Ritz, and they had a royally good time. Actually, they did it all again the next day too. And on VJ Day in August too. A Channel 4 documentary this week suggested that perhaps the most lasting consequence of this expedition was that among the escorting officers was Group Captain Peter Townsend and that the young Princess Margaret formed a crush on him then that led directly to the romantic frustrations and disasters of her later life.
A Royal Night Out, set entirely on that day 70 years ago, written by Trevor De Silva and Kevin Hood, directed by Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane, Kinky Boots, Brideshead Revisited) changes all that. Townsend is out, Margaret’s just a joke. Instead it’s a romcom for Princess Elizabeth, a fairytale, an adaptation of Audrey Hepburn’s escapade in Roman Holiday.
As George VI, Rupert Everett is satisfactorily distinguished, brittle and a bit weak yet sympathetic, if no match for Colin Firth’s turn in The King’s Speech. As Queen Elizabeth in that film, Helena Bonham Carter was alive and mischievous as ever — but here she’s played as a pursed lips sourpuss by Emily Watson, though such reproval suits her role here, so you could say she is well cast. The King and Queen appear mainly only at the start
and end of the night, in any case. Elizabeth and Margaret together talk hem into letting them go out and, daftly, hey are given an escort of just two chinss wonders from Chelsea barracks from hom the girls soon escape, before ecoming separated themselves in the mob, heading off on different buses. Margaret (so well played as a little girl n The King’s Speech by Ramona Marquez om Outnumbered) is made into a fanastic comedy turn by super-pert, puga ced 23-year-old Bel Powley from shepherd’s Bush. (It seems Juno Temple as originally up for this role but Powley so great you soon forget any disappointment.) Her Margaret (let’s forget about er being 14?) is a dance-crazy, sex-mad, premature lush, up for anything, first icked up by a predatory naval officer hen falling in with a slightly more avunular pimp (Roger Allam), who recognises er — it is one of the conventions of the lm, never quite explained, that nobody n the crowd at any point recognises the rls until they announce themselves — efore ending up in a wheelbarrow. Princess Elizabeth is played by the astonishingly beautiful 28-year-old Canaian actress Sarah Gadon, who has orked a lot with David Cronenberg ncluding as the ghostly mother in Maps o the Stars). She is, I am sorry to have to eport, far more fine-featured, nervy and xpressive than HM ever was at any age and that starriness allows her to rule he film convincingly, even more than the ork she has put in mimicking the princess’s mannerisms. She meets a surly young workingclass airman ( Jack Reynor, amazingly similar to Jack O’Connell, both specialising in truculent rebelliousness), after falling out of a bus with him. He’s full of class-resentment, after a tough war — but he has a heart of gold and over the night protects her again and again, not out of fawning loyalty but natural chivalry. When he finally does clock who she is, he’s even furious at being deceived, one of the film’s false notes. How far will lèsemajesté go? Will they kiss? Properly?
The film romps away happily. Chatsworth and Belvoir stand in for Buckingham Palace well enough and a little filming was allowed in the Mall and Trafalgar Square with the permission of the Royal Parks — although most of the street scenes, both in the West End and the back alleys of Soho, were filmed in Hull, believe it or not, because it is cheaper and friendlier and more backward.
My favourite ever moment in a history play was in an afternoon Radio 4 Arthurian job, where one of the last Romans left in Britain ate an orange and said, you realise this may be the last orange to be eaten in this country for centuries to come. There are a number of such moments in A Royal Night Out. Elizabeth is clear already that thi s is the one moment in her life when she will ever rub shoulders with the common people. She even wisely tells Jack: “By the way, I don’t think the future belongs to just my lot — and I don’t think you do either.” But there are lots of broadly funny lines too — “Cooee! I’m back!” shrieks Margaret on waking up again — and that whole tease of seeing the royals treated as commoners, out of benign ignorance rather than republican re-assignment, which delights us so much even today, is richly indulged. It’s fun.
Of course, there’s only one reviewer of this film we’d all like to hear from. When I asked her what she made of it, I was a bit surprised at the vigour of her answer, I have to say. But she made me promise not to pass it on.
One of the conventions of the film, never quite explained, is that nobody in the crowd at any point recognises the girls until they announce themselves