A thrilling piece of political theatre

King Charles III BBC Two, Wednesday

is an audacious act of lèsemajesté and a thrilling piece of theatrical dynamite. Mike Bartlett’s play, which first opened in London in 2014, is set in a near future that imagines the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the threat posed to the British constitution when her eldest son accedes to the throne. Charles, you see, is an unlikely advocate for press freedom and his views force him to halt a bill which has been passed by both the House of Commons and the Lords. Soon enough, the country is plunged into anarchy.

So how would Bartlett’s work, witty and clear-eyed, though inherently theatrical, translate to television? In this age where the average viewer’s attention span is apparently inferior to that of a goldfish, a wordy play – much of it in blank verse – poses a significant challenge. Rupert Goold’s nimble direction, however, ensured that this was no bottom-numbing piece of Reithian intellectual fibre. King Charles III was dynamic, inventive and moving.

Much poignancy came, of course, from the fact that Charles was played by Tim Pigott-Smith who died last month. Lines such as “Without my voice and spirit, I am dust”, acquired a particular emotional power in the circumstances, as did the slow, tragic denouement in which this “Albion oak sown in British soil” found himself usurped by William, Prince of Wales (Oliver Chris) and his ambitious wife Kate (Charlotte Riley). Pigott-Smith captured many shades of Charles’s personality – his handwringing anxiety, his need for filial love and his unwavering sense of loyalty.

KIt was a magnificent curtain call for an actor who delivered performances of acute insight and dramatic force for over 40 years.

Of the other performances, the one that resonated the most was Richard Goulding’s. He gave a highly sympathetic portrayal of Harry as a prince in a gilded cage – “a ginger joke bereft of value” – who was desperate to marry for love and cast off the princely burden of his birth.

Goold had remained loyal to his original cast which meant that TV audiences were treated to performances by fine actors all too rarely offered decent opportunities by the medium. These included Margot Leicester as a strong and loyal Camilla and Adam James as a Blairite PM (clearly the idea of a Labour government felt less fanciful in 2014 than it does today). I was less taken with Riley’s rather too crisp approximation of the manipulative Kate. She was new to the role and lacked the uptight sexiness of Lydia Wilson who played her on the London stage and on Broadway – proof perhaps that the actors needed time to marinate in the nuance of Bartlett’s clever, quasiShakespearean dialogue.

For many years TV drama was an extension of theatre, with actors reciting lines in studio settings, always conscious of the fourth wall. Now, TV drama is an extension of film with audiences expecting short, punchy scenes and budgets that suggest a cinematic experience. King Charles III was old-fashioned in this sense, but rarely was that a problem (although the scenes featuring the ghost of Diana were perhaps a little too heightened to work seamlessly on TV). It was thrillingly contemporary and proof that TV should look to modern theatre, with its urgent political agenda and unorthodox creative energy, for inspiration.

Pigott-Smith captured Prince Charles’s handwringing anxiety

Ba workmanlike biopic of Barbara Windsor, didn’t have theatrical roots, even if Tony Jordan’s script was as much a love letter to the theatre as it was to its subject. The main action took place just before a shabby end-of-the-pier show in 1993, when Windsor’s career was in the doldrums. From this vantage point, she had conversations with the dramatis personae of her life and the stages of her past – at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, at Aida Foster’s stage school – merged with the less auspicious platform on which she now stood. It was an effective device when evoking the high-camp world of Carry On films and Sixties cabaret, but jarred when examining Windsor’s life, which was too often portrayed as soap opera, perhaps confusing her a little with her EastEnders alter-ego Peggy Mitchell. “Wait for me,” gasped Windsor’s dodgy beau Ronnie Knight (Luke Allen-Gale) with more than a whiff of melodrama, as he was carted off for another stretch at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. The best thing about Babs

Alter egos: the cast of King Charles III, above; and two of the actresses who played Barbara Windsor in Babs, Samantha Spiro (left) and Jaime Winstone, with Windsor herself, below