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Emma Cunniffe as Queen Anne and Natascha McElhone as Sarah Churchill Pictures: Manuel Harlan Queen AnneThe Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon***** There is something about the RSC’s Swan
Theatre which lends itself as no other to a unique excellence. Rather like Symphony Hall, the Stratford venue
with its deep thrust stage, a wonder of 1980s interior design by
architect Michael Reardon, seems to will its performers - and directors
- to fly to extra heights. How many plays, though
not primarily Shakespeare, have hit the mark there (though
King Henry VIII
, with Jane Lapotaire, leaps quickly to mind,
or Antony and Cleopatra
with Patrick Stewart. What about its coeval
Winter’s Tale
and Pericles
Or David Troughton’s
Macbeth; plus (without Britten)
The Rape of Lucrece)? But call to mind
restored
Shakespeare (Edward III),
and putative semi-Shakespeare (Sir
Thomas More,
Cardenio);
recall his great contemporaries: Jonson’s
Volpone
(which has just been revitalised, with Henry Goodman),
The Alchemist,
Sejanus
or The Devil is an Ass,
with John Nettles magnificent onstage and Douglas Henshall side-crackingly
funny as the spurious ‘Spanish Lady. Think of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (revisited earlier this year); of Marston and Wycherley; of Middleton’s Women, Beware Women; or Massinger’s The Roman Actor, about the death of Domitian; then Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, plus Linus Roche as a sensual Don Juan from the Spanish Golden Age (Tirso de Molina). Add some miraculous
solo turns from Victor Spinetti; from the RSC’s current Falstaff Anthony
Sher (Cyrano de Bergerac),
and Birmingham’s own unique Sheila Steafel; or call to mind Alec McCowen,
doubling a magically s Anne , with her
heartrending loss of children, (smallbox, from which she herself had
suffered, was the prime killer of the day - Voltaire would shortly write
that 60% of the 18th
century French population caught it and 20% of the people died from it;
it wasn’t till the 1790s that Jenner carried out his landmark
experiments successfully pioneering the cowpox vaccine); along with a
ropy succession problem, introverted court tussles, and above all the
Duke of Marlborough’s continental victories (Blenheim, Ramillies,
Oudenaarde, Malplaquet); and the 1707 Treaty of Union (of the Scottish
and English crowns), has long been a potential subject for a cracking
new play. John Churchill’s famous victories are almost
incidental to Helen Edmundson’s canny, superbly crafted text, which
works on teasing out the women’s point of view while the men either
battle (Robert Cavangh’s thoughtfully understated Marlborough,
invariably disappearing offstage to notch up the 1704-9 triumphs in the
Low Countries) or scheme (Jonathan Broadbent’s Tory manipulation of the
Queen., a welter of part royal-approved intrigue, is a matter of
fascination throughout). Yet if we are spared the blood in Flanders and
pre-Belgium Belgium, we are given the politics that attended upon it and
which followed from it (Marlborough himself will be disgraced for
milking the public purse, with royal backing, to build Blenheim Palace):
above all, the long and intricate (almost lesbian, but latterly soured)
relationship - which dated back to before Anne’s accession; with
Churchill’s wife, Sarah. Queen and Duchess, they called each other ‘Mrs.
Morley and Mrs Freeman’, inventing a measure of social equality: a
delightful little twist which colours and features in Edmundson’s
beautifully and intelligently rehearsed play; there are lots of human
touches like this which enliven what was both a political and a classic
female standoff between the two women (classic, because Sarah
increasingly encroaches on, and all but betrays, their intensity of the
early years). Don’t promote (or overpromote) your friends, seems one of
the conclusions that might be drawn from this awesomely passionate, as
well as hugely tense, drama. There’s no avoiding it: this story of Anne, with
its poignancy, pathos and meaningful rather than just catty female
bickering, where the behind the scenes, internal battles of politics so
relevant to our present day and age (we seem incapable of understanding
how, dialogue, debate and dialectic are crucial to the reaching of any
decision. political or personal), emerges almost as a fairy tale: a
chronicle or fable of pure gold.
And it is so here.
Edmundson’s Queen Anne,
often enough couched in an exquisite and fluent alternately
iambic-trochaic verse - of which Shakespeare would have been proud -
interspersed with flurries of fluent prose, is, I would argue, right up
there with the best of biographical plays:
The Life of Galileo,
Schiller’s Mary Stuart
and Wallenstein,
Büchner’s
Danton’s Death, Rattigan’s
Adventure Story,
David Pownall’s
Music to Murder By,
Edward Bond’s Lear,
and particularly in this case, Alan Bennett’s
The Madness of King George. Natalie Abrahami’s fresh-as-a-daisy RSC staging -
a wonderful, rich, rewarding evening in the theatre - effortlessly romps
off with its five stars: for sheer eloquence; for the impressive
assurance and deftness of individual performances; for the outstanding
quality of direction and sense of pacing (Abrahami hails from Hull
Truck, Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre and more recently the Young Vic); and
for the endless joy of Edmundson’s waste-not-a-moment script. She has a quarter of a
century of such drafting behind her, not least
Mother Teresa is Dead
(suddenly topical, given the last few days’ news), and the adaptation
Coram Boy.
Patently a writer of real range, Edmundson followed Golden Age Spain (Calderón)
with the delicious Swallows and Amazons
(Bristol, London’s West End, National Tour). In a way there is something Arthur Ransome-ish
about the fracas that increasingly undermines and finally unravels the
two women’s intense, genuine but fraught friendship. Both seem at times
pretty child-like, Sarah in her smug, domineering bossiness, Anne in her
quiet resentment that will ultimately, for all her acquiescence,
generosity and obvious diffidence, boil over. She can never quite become Queen till she has
dispatched and dispensed with this adorer/confidante/adviser
(wonderfully and mischievously enacted by a notably gifted Natascha
McElhone) and assumed the role of leader herself; it is almost Hal and
Falstaff, Nicholas II and Rasputin. Emma Cunniffe’s Anne clocks up, if anything,
several notches better. While Sarah is a natural schemer and betimes
bully, Anne’s put-uponness, her long-sufferingness, her considerateness
is all drawn from her experience of personal tragedy. Those few-
days’-surviving, still-born or toddler deaths; two gorgeous small girls,
potential subjects for Gainsborough in a later era, simply excised by
the worst pox of all; and the expiry aged 11 of Prince William). It may
have been almost the norm then, and almost into Victorian times, but
nothing makes it easier. This is a woman, and a monarch, who has ached
with grief. Actually McElhone’s Sarah is drawn up in her
tracks midway through the play, when her son Jack (a sympathetic showing
from Elliott Ross), older but only just starting to win his spurs, also
drops dead. You would have thought this might make Lady Churchill pause
for thought; but if anything, it makes her more convinced that she alone
is right. Not a good idea for an adviser to a ruler (witness Thomas
Cromwell; call up Buckingham). Edmundson seasons the drama with selected
characters who supply what may be characterised as vignettes. Jonathan
Broadbent’s Harley, slithering up a particularly greasy pole, is
actually far from a vignette: his engineering makes him the third most
important figure in the play, in an era when Whig and Tory were
virtually first defined, and when the role of Prime Minister, usually
attributed first to Walpole (who became First Lord of the Treasury in
1721 under George I) virtually emerged. But the by now widowed
William III, Anne’s brother-in-law, played with a nice seasoning of
character by Carl Prekopp, though appearing several times, gets but a
modest look-in text-wise. The Lord Chancellor, Sydney Godolphin
(1645-1712), a Charles II protege and nearing the end of an extra-long
political career (a bit like Duke Humphrey in
Henry VI), is
to be seen frequently fussing around, partly ineffectually taking his
orders for others, and enjoying his best stage moment only when he is
finally sacked and put out to grass The writer Daniel Defoe (Carl Prekopp taking a second role), well worth a play in his own right - the sort of Swiftian character who might well have played a role in the soon-to-be launched Spectator paper - does have some juicy asides and pithy observations: arguably he is the most serious opportunity missed among those characters not fully developed but left to swim for themselves. It’s arguably a criticism of the text’s structure; yet because each character’s brief intrusion does add something, definitely not one serious enough to spoil the impact of the appetising whole play. Hywel Morgan as Prince George of Denmark But the ‘minor’
character whom I liked and enjoyed most was Hywel Morgan’s Prince George
of Denmark, father to all those 17 dead children. His (the Prince’s)
role in history must actually have been a far from minor one, and what
satisfied especially was the way he recalled (perhaps anticipated?), by
his sensitivity and non-intrusiveness,
not just Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert, but the version we see in the
film Young Victoria,
matching Emily Blunt with the wonderful Rupert Friend, who captures to
the letter the enlightened Germanness, the affection, wisdom and old
head on young shoulders feel of the young Albert, and shows exactly why
he was beloved of the British political classes and aristocracy at
least. You feel with this brother and uncle of Danish
kings, who during the play’s just over a decade-long span is in his
mid-40s to mid-50s (he died aged 55 in 1708, around the very time Anne’s
relationship with Sarah Churchill disintegrated), with a haltingly,
almost amusingly Germanic English accent, is a hugely sympathetic
husband, and might well have been an architect or designer or adviser to
city planners, or indeed visionary, such as Albert later became - only
to expire at a mere 42. Morgan made something
of this tentative adjunct to the monarchy (not, one felt, a Consort in
the way Albert was in the 19th
century or indeed Prince Philip in the 20th).
Mary, elder daughter of a rejected catholic monarch (James II), was for
her brief five years, being the real heir, raised to an equal stance
with William, rather like the 16th
Spanish dual monarchy. One might think the ever-loyal,
there-when-you-need-me George, especially being from dutifully
Protestant Scandinavia, might have deserved being better remembered by a
grateful nation. A statue, perhaps? Handel began his long
connection with the British court round about that time, arriving in
1711 and settling in 1712, and one of the loveliest pieces of music he
ever composed was his secular Birthday
Ode for Queen Anne, most likely first
heard on 6 February 1713, and celebrating above all the Treaty of
Utrecht which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession, which had
justified all those Marlborough victories. Utrecht was signed off by a
Tory government, showing how Jonathan Broadbent’s wily Harley (who
changed parties like Marlborough’s descendant Winston Churchill) had
triumphed in winning the monarch’s ear. It did him little good: Robert
Harley was out on his own ear, and even imprisoned, once George of
Hanover succeeded in 1714 But the startling music, and above all the
trumpet-supported aria ‘Eternal source of light divine’ (‘And with
distinguished glory shine / To add a lustre to this day’), like the
quite stunning portraits of Anne and her short-lived children by Van
Dyck’s successor at court, Sir Godfrey Kneller (originally Lübeck-born
Gottfried Kniller, 1646-1723), both remind us of the fabulous
achievements and unblemished military glory which marked this curiously
neglected ruler’s reign. What a tragedy there was no Shakespeare to write
us verse plays on monarchs from Edward VI and Mary to James II and Anne.
All were tinged with tragedy. No reign among these could compare with
Henry VIII and above all Elizabeth I’s, were it not for Anne’s. What Helen Edmundson
and the RSC team have done is to show us - we know it well from the
bard’s Henry IV
or Garbo’s Queen Christina
- the pain and crippling isolation of monarchy. In plainly stands in a
great tradition. This is a superlative play, no mistake about it. And we
have been given a great production to match it. Hurrah for both. To
23-01-15 Roderic Dunnett
09-12-15 The production will upon in the West End at The Theatre Royal, Haymarket running throughout the summer from 30 June to 30 September. Theatre Royal Haymarket or Seatplan
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poken
main house Prospero with the pouty, perplexed yet oddly amorous composer
in 
(by Anne); John Radcliffe (Michael Fenton Stevens), no less, is Anne’s
physician, much needed even after her pregnancies cease at the turn of
the century, but not developed.