And that’s the premise for By Royal Appointment (Mayflower Theatre, Southampton, July 9-12; and also (Richmond Theatre London, July 22-26), Guildford Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, July 29-August 2), a funny, poignant and celebratory new play about the kind of power that only a Queen can wield – she charms the world through coats and admonishes her family through a carefully chosen hat.
Anne Reid plays The Queen, Caroline Quentin is The Dresser, with Olivier award-winning James Dreyfus as The Milliner and James Wilby as The Designer in a new play written by Daisy Goodwin and directed by former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole.
James Wilby said: “It’s a very clever way of discussing the Queen by allowing yourself a fictitious look at what might have been said. It is a very warm portrait of the Queen. We have this extraordinary love for the Queen because she was the only monarch that until recently any of us probably had ever known. When she died, it was a massive, massive thing for the nation. Anne Reid doesn’t attempt to impersonate her in any way. She just is her. She is remarkable. She is 90 and she captures the Queen’s dryness and her wit and above all her warmth. She is warm and human and very down to earth and there’s a lot of people that will recognise her, along with her great sense of humour.
“And this is about her clothes. The main characters are the Queen herself and her dresser who is an amalgamation of various characters and also her designer is also based on the number of characters but mainly Hardy Amies who was a war hero and a very clever designer. There is also a milliner who is another character who is an amalgamation of various characters. The whole thing allows the writer to explore conversations that might have happened, and the play becomes very moving in the second half.
“I think there’s been long enough now to accept a new monarch and the last Queen did live to quite an extraordinary age, but this play doesn’t say anything that is in any way out of keeping. I would not have done it at all otherwise. There is not a moment of bad taste.
“I play the designer. He is gay. He is a man that has hidden that all his life. He is very discreet. He’s very good at his job and he has a great sense of self and purpose but he had a father who loathed him. He is quite a complex character.”
James admits that you can sigh inwardly when you get in the car to drive a long way to the next theatre on the tour but he is loving it: “I became an actor because I love the theatre not because I loved film or TV but I pretty quickly realised that if I wanted to make a living out of it then I had to do a lot more film and TV than I did theatre. But the theatre is an incredible discipline. It is an absolute discipline. You can explore the character during rehearsals whereas on film and TV you have to produce the character pretty much straight away but with this it can develop.”
And the fascination is that the play will be quite different by the time it reaches the end of the tour: “You learn where the audience are rapt and where they are not. You learn where the laughs are and you learn not tread on the laughs. You have to make sure they happen. Proper laughter in the theatre is so important. It allows breathing space for you and for the audience, and the piece grows. There’s something wonderfully raw about the beginning of a tour which makes it so worth going to but then by the end of the tour there is something so profoundly polished that again it’s so worth going to. But it is such a big thing. When I am on tour, my entire day is based around the fact that I’m going to walk on stage at 7:30 that evening.”
Source: Sussex World / Phil Hewitt
