Nobody wore clothes like the late Queen. By Royal Appointment considers the meanings that lay behind all those dresses and hats. It begins in late 2022. The Queen has died and her devoted dresser (Caroline Quentin) is being asked by the curator (Gráinne Dromgoole) of a multi-media retrospective show to reveal what records she has kept of all the clothes and jewellery that the Queen wore on public occasions. Quentin vividly conveys the dresser’s combative character, fiercely protective of her past role as the Queen’s companion and confidante. Initially reluctant, she is persuaded to hand over her meticulously detailed records.
A series of short vignettes follows, starting in 1969 with the investiture of the Prince of Wales, and progressing then on through significant years in the Queen’s reign. Each is introduced by the curator with a whimsical precis of that year’s events, juxtaposing the serious with the banal. For example, we learn that 1979 featured both Jeremy Thorpe’s trial for conspiracy to murder and The Village People’s performance of YMCA on Top Of The Pops. Each scene focuses on a discussion between the Queen (Anne Reid), her dress designer (James Wilby) and her milliner (James Dreyfus – gloriously camp). Jonathan Fensom’s uncluttered set design, hinting at grandeur, allows space for back projections of photographs showing the real Queen wearing the relevant clothes.
Queen Elizabeth was famously reticent. We can be sure that she loved horses, corgis and Prince Philip, not necessarily in that order, but much else remains hidden. Writer Daisy Goodwin has centred on the idea that she had a silent mode of expression. Each dress colour, or piece of jewellery, carried a significant message. For example, the jade green dress she wore on her state visit to the Republic of Ireland was most certainly not a random choice, though we might suspect that it was one directed more by the Foreign Office than by the Queen herself.
Goodwin is a witty writer, and the play comes to life in the moments where the dresser, the designer and the milliner waspishly bicker. Based upon the real-life Scouser Angela Kelly, war hero Hardy Amies and Australian Freddie Fox, they fire off critical barbs while reluctantly recognising each rival’s expertise. Much of this is comic, but James Wilby is particularly impressive in a darker scene where he reflects bitterly upon his fraught relationship with his father, who never recognised his wartime bravery or accepted his homosexuality. Amies and Fox were both gay, and Goodwin writes in the programme notes that the Queen was often ‘presented to the world through a queer lens.’ An interesting thought, though not one that By Royal Appointment really explores in any depth.
As the Queen, Anne Reid looks the part, but wisely does not attempt an outright vocal impersonation. But other than presenting the Queen as a stoical believer in the virtue of a stiff upper lip she has little scope for revealing her as an interesting character. When faced with her milliner’s extreme distress at his partner’s death from AIDS her bland response is, ‘Whatever it is, will pass.’ Goodwin has shied away from any suggestion that there might have been much more to the Queen than met the eye, or that she might have had any interesting flaws. She remains a blank canvas.
Both the gentle humour that pervades most of the writing and the bite-size nature of the scenes make By Royal Appointment an undemanding, cheerfully royalist piece of entertainment that in no way challenges the assumptions that lie behind the institution that it portrays.
★★★☆☆ Mike Whitton
Source: Stage talk Magazine / Reviewer: Mike Whitton / Photo credit: Nobby Clark
