Review Queen Anne

Francis Beckett delights in a play on Britain's last Stuart monarch which is both perceptive about its two real-life heroines and a tremendous theatrical success. 

Queen Anne
by Helen Edmundson

A Right Royal Drama
http://www.trh.co.uk/

Queen Anne was in many ways a tragic figure.  She had seventeen pregnancies, but gave birth to only three live children, none of whom lived beyond the age of eleven. Her biographer Anne Somerset writes in the theatre programme that she was “poorly educated, chronically shy and disabled by agonising arthritic attacks.”

She did her best nonetheless to fulfil the duties imposed on her by the iron laws of heredity, and to cope with the vigorous and vitriolic political atmosphere of the time.

Indeed, Helen Edmundson’s play opens with a guilty pleasure, an appallingly hurtful but hilarious satirical song about her inability to have children. This has her trying to deliver a child, but delivering only something unnamed which apparently rhymes with art.

The drama focusses on her relationship with Sarah, wife of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, from whom Sir Winston Churchill was descended. Sarah was the opposite of Anne: clever, beautiful, confident, ambitious. The two were the closest of friends, then the bitterest of enemies.

This tense, tightly written and tautly plotted play charts their relationship. Its respect for the known facts would surely win the approval of Hilary Mantel, but it also weaves them into a gripping yet often very funny play.

From the start we are on the side of the needy and manipulative Anne, yet never cease to care about what happens to the brave and manipulative Sarah, whose sophisticated political antennae seem to abandon her after the death of her son.

The script has not a single unnecessary word in it – nothing is spelled out if it can be left to the audience to work it out – and Natalie Abrahami’s direction in this RSC production reflects that economy. Hannah Clark’s set is splendid yet discreet. It knows its place. It is there to supplement the dialogue, not substitute for it.

Yet it is the two central performances on which the evening stands or falls - Emma Cunniffe’s Anne and Romola Garai’s Sarah -  and they are both wonderful.

Cunniffe and Garai capture both the humanity and the political power struggle in a way that easily stands comparison with Mark Rylance’s Cromwell in Mantel's Wolf Hall.

This is one of the best and most gripping evenings in the theatre I can remember for a long time. That's not just because I know a little of the history. For I took with me a South African cousin who knew nothing of Queen Anne, and she was as gripped by the human and political drama as I was. A green light to rush to the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Review The Dresser

The Dresser
by Ronald Harwood

On The Chessboard
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/duke-of-yorks/

The King is in his counting house in Ronald Harewood's 1980 play The Dresser,  but his health is failing and mental faculties faltering. Yet he remains literally a man of many roles, running a Shakespearean repertory company during World War II bombing and taking on Shakespeare's King Lear, Richard III and, yes, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in alternate performances.

Played here by Ken Stott, "Sir" the actor/manager inherits the legacy of actors like Edmund Kean in more ways than one.  He maintains a precarious hierarchy, in a manner part galley slave gangmaster, part headmaster, touring the British Isles.

All the while, he's kept on his feet, chivvied, bolstered by and nannied on to the boards by his dresser for 16 years, superstitious yet expedient Norman (Reece Shearsmith).

A comedy, a tragedy and - in the case of Norman - a touch of music hall variety, The Dresser hearks back to a repertory system age when theatre became part of, and was in part bailed out, by the national war effort.   But here the countdown to the production of King Lear, instead of an ordered chessboard,  is as out of sync as the Lear mad scene, mired, we are subtly reminded, in the dangerous politics of the time.

At its centre Stott captivates and repels with his fruity tones and timing as the collapsing, mercurial, selfish Sir.

Sir who is dependent on the lure of the footlights to impress and bring fresh meat to the company yet still determined, however haphazardly, to keep what he sees as "the faith".  

The only male actors available are those not called up - too old or invalided out. Like bespectacled Geoffrey (Simon Rouse), with the air of a civil servant rather than a thespian, unexpectedly elevated to the role of Fool. Or a saturnine Oxenby (Adam Jackson-Smith) who could possibly be a communist or maybe something else, at any rate out for "a new world order", especially if it involves  a play he has written.  

While "Sir" is "sir" to his company, it is his apparent consort who is truly "Her Ladyship" (a Wagneresque Harriet Thorpe), the daughter of a Baronet, although perhaps first brought in like another minor artistocrat's daughter who is mentioned and whose mother invested money in the company.

Also part of the aging thespian's retinue is the efficient stage manager spinster, Madge (Selina Cadell), whom we learn was dazzled at the start of her career by the footlights and "Sir" but has now having given up all hope of that first passion for  him being reciprocated,

Directed by Sean Foley, The Dresser takes place on a handsome, detailed set designed by Michael Taylor. A crossways' dressing room with corridor at the side occupies the first act and a revolving set revealing backstage, the wings and finally full frontal performance in the second, with neat musical transitions by Ben and Max Ringham and lighting from James Farncombe.

Inspired by Ronald Harwood's time as a dresser for Donald Wolfit, there's plenty of kingly pomp, as much as farcical missed entrances, in the play within the play. As well as visceral insight when the lives of the protagonists and the Shakespearean drama superimpose on each other.  Yet this is no sentimental trip down memory lane.

Despite the comedy, The Dresser is a sad, bitter play focussing on a theatrical world which subsists as a perpetually under-funded hierarchy of coercion and exploitation.

With its sporadic, if gentle, hints that performance also underpins violent debt-fuelled politics, it's a green light for this strange, double-edged dissection of a touring company at war.