Play Reading Roundup: Monarchy Past & Future

Harry Smith as Prince Harry, Robert Joy as King Charles, and Michelle Beck as Jess in King Charles III at ACT, 2016. Photo by Kevin Berne.

Technically, Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee—seventy years on the throne—occurred in February, but the public jubilee celebrations didn’t take place until this past weekend. While people in Britain enjoyed a bank holiday, street parties, and a lot of hoopla, I decided to mark the occasion in my own way, by finally reading two recent-ish plays that address the theme of the British Monarchy in the 21st century: Peter Morgan’s The Audience and Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III.

The Audience by Peter Morgan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Peter Morgan has made a career of dramatizing the life of Queen Elizabeth II, with the film The Queen in 2006, the Netflix series The Crown in the late 2010s, and the stage play The Audience in between them in the early 2010s. I tend to find the family drama stuff on The Crown more compelling than the political drama, but perhaps Morgan would disagree. Because The Audience is all politics and no family, as it explores Elizabeth’s relationships with 8 different Prime Ministers over a 60-year period.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, and many scenes feature clunky Wikipedia-like bits of dialogue to establish the year and the characters. Throughout, the Queen serves as a stable figurehead while Prime Ministers of all stripes come and go; yet we come to understand that, deep down, despite their differences of politics and class and gender and age, the PMs have more in common than they know. For instance, the Queen’s conversation with Tony Blair on the eve of the Iraq War echoes her conversation with Anthony Eden on the eve of the Suez Crisis. But I wish more had been done with this theme, especially considering that theater can tell stories in non-naturalistic and non-chronological ways; that the play were more of a phantasmagoria swirling together 60 years of Prime Ministers, as opposed to a staid succession of vignettes.

True, the vignettes here are arranged for dramatic effect, not according to strict chronology. The Act II climax features the long-awaited appearance of Margaret Thatcher—the only female prime minister shown here, since this play premiered before Theresa May took office. It’s a powerful choice, as Thatcher is “a woman of almost equal iconic power to the Queen, and of near-identical age” (per the stage directions). But the overall emotional through-line is the Queen’s relationship with Harold Wilson, the only PM who gets three different scenes and a real arc. This means that the heart of the play is the irony that this tradition-bound monarch felt more genuine fondness for the working-class, left-wing Wilson than for some PMs who had more conservative politics and upper-class backgrounds.

Do I believe it? I don’t know; I’m an American who had barely even heard of Wilson before watching The Crown and reading this play. And I think theatergoers (who tend to be liberal) want to believe that the Queen could befriend a Labour PM and try to persuade Thatcher to impose sanctions against apartheid South Africa. But hasn’t the royal family shown themselves to be more conservative than that on many other occasions? And how can this salt-of-the-earth queen be the same woman who invokes the divine right of kings in order to provide a dazzling Act One finale? Certainly this play’s Elizabeth is a tour-de-force role for an actress, but I don’t know if the script actually reflects her personality or her contradictions.

King Charles III by Mike Bartlett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fairly soon there will come a time where King Charles III, or at least its title, is no longer “future history” but present fact, so I decided to spend the Platinum Jubilee weekend finally giving Mike Bartlett’s award-winning play a read. It’s my constitutional right as an American, you know?

This is the play that, infamously, envisions the first several months of Charles’ reign as a parody of a Shakespearean history play, complete with ghosts, verse soliloquies, and a restless prince named Harry who spends too much time drinking with commoners. Most infamously of all, this play shows Harry trying to distance himself from the royal family after getting involved with a Black woman. (Well, the race of Harry’s working-class girlfriend Jess is not actually specified in the script, but it seems that she is often played by Black actresses.)

If Bartlett is that accurate about Harry, let’s hope he isn’t also that accurate about Charles: the play depicts Britain being thrown into a constitutional crisis and nearly to civil war, when Charles declines to sign a Parliamentary bill that would result in more government oversight of the British press.

Weirdly, the Shakespeare play I think it makes the most sense to compare this to is King John —not one of Shakespeare’s greatest hits. But both plays are about an unpopular, uncharismatic king, neither wicked enough to be a tragic villain nor virtuous enough to be a tragic hero, who overreaches, angers his countrymen, and has to get out of the way for order to be restored. Of course, there are more specific echoes of other Shakespeare plays here too: some of Charles’ reflections on kingship recall Richard II’s soliloquies, and by Act V he’s embattled and besieged like Macbeth.

Also like a Shakespeare play, there are some unexpectedly beautiful moments even for minor characters. I didn’t know how much I needed an iambic pentameter monologue where a television producer describes the nightmare of going viral for doing something silly on air:

And then that clip goes viral and from then
Forever more, I am the girl who jumped
It is the matter of my life, and when
I die it will be what is writ, not all
I did, and wanted, and achieved, but that:
A captured idiocy stuck on repeat.

Still, at times I wished the verse were more finely wrought—Bartlett has a habit of cramming in too many syllables (“Take pen, and sign the wretched and corrupted bill”) or using auxiliary “do” verbs to make the verse scan (“Oh God, if anyone did see me now”). I will say, though, that when I watched the 2017 TV film starring much of the original stage cast, those verse irregularities were much less noticeable than when I read it. Partly, it’s because talented actors are amazing; partly, it’s a matter of directorial approach. In my head, I imagined this as a stage production that played up the theatrical, Shakespearean rhetoric, which made the clunky lines stand out in a bad way; the film feels much more low-key and naturalistic, if an alternate-history drama where King Charles III has a blank-verse soliloquy comparing Parliament to “an option added on / Like satnav on a car,” could ever be called naturalistic.