Rialto Note:
We’ll Never Know
15 June 2015

On Saturday night, we saw a performance of The Audience, Peter Morgan’s extension of The Queen franchise. I ordered a copy of the play shortly after it opened in London, on the chance that it might be too good to miss. I decided that it wasn’t. Then the show came to Broadway, and Kathleen wanted to go. So she got us three front-row-center seats (we took an old friend), and there we were, not six feet from Helen Mirren when she got down on her knees to say the Lord’s Prayer. There are dogs in the show. I wonder how well they have to be trained to assure that they won’t be distracted by clowns sitting where I was, holding up a biscuit or a treat.

I wept through the whole thing. Of course I did. It was a grand spectacle. (More than it would have been in London. The first act now ends with Elizabeth’s coronation, to the tune of “Zadok the Priest.”) One conceit of The Audience is its exploitation of a curious moment in the Queen’s life: once a week, she has a private, personal, and — this is the curious part — unscripted conversation with someone outside Palace life, someone she doesn’t really know. The current prime minister informs the sovereign of current affairs. The sovereign cannot overrule the prime minister’s decisions, but she can discuss them freely. There is every indication that these meetings have not, on balance, been a waste of time for anybody.

There have been twelve prime ministers in Elizabeth’s long reign. What with Her Majesty’s age and the extent of David Cameron’s recent victory, it is not inconceivable  that Elizabeth might be dead or incompetent by the time Cameron’s successor comes into office, but twelve is a good number, and the fact that the first of them was Winston Churchill must have preyed somewhat on the ensuing eleven minds. It is the Queen, of course, who constitutes the audience. She listens, she comments, she presumably remembers. She compares and contrasts.

Does she? Is any of Morgan’s re-creation true, or even plausible? What does the real Elizabeth think about it? As Helen Mirren herself said after The Queen got things going, we’ll probably never know. There’s a lovely exchange with Cameron; they’re talking about mobile phones.

Elizabeth: I begged them not to give me one, but then security persuaded me it doubled as a useful tracking device in case I try to escape.

Mirren interposed a beautifully timed pause before “in case…”, and brought the house down. The Elizabeth of this particular moment is an old woman, still dutiful as ever but perhaps inclined to think that one has been doing this for long enough. Does Elizabeth the Actual ever crack jokes of this kind? And, if so, is her timing as good as Mirren’s?

What does Her Majesty think about this play? It used to be treason — and this was an ancien régime generality, not an English thing — to represent the sovereign on the stage, and the ban has not been lifted for so long that, thirty years or so ago, Prunella Scales’s appearance as the Queen, in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, did not excite a very perceptible frisson among Her Majesty’s subjects at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. In that play, a last-minute alteration of the Queen’s schedule causes her to bump into Sir Anthony Blunt, the man in charge of her art collection and, infamously, a Soviet spy. Bennett’s brilliant dialogue is an extended double-entendre — possibly. Is the Queen on to Blunt?

We’ll never know.

What the Queen might think of The Audience was, predictably, the first question that came up at dinner, after the show. I didn’t ask it, but I certainly wondered; and then the play itself answered the question, if obliquely. To ask what Elizabeth thinks about a play is to ask what she thinks about generally, and it is probably the case that she does not think much of or about the theatre. It is possible (although difficult to see just where) that some little bit here or there in the play might give offense, or even wound, but one expects that the lady would move on briskly to other matters. She has other things to think about.

She heads an enormous extended family. There is the Royal Family of course, but I’m thinking more about the small army of — let us call them “employees.” They all work for what the royals are said to call “the Firm,” but then so do the royals themselves, in their view — the Queen most of all. The setup may look feudal, with its ladies-in-waiting and its footmen and its equerries. But I daresay that Elizabeth does not imagine that all of these people are working for her. Yes, the staff is responsive to her commands. In another lovely scene, Harold Wilson claims to have a photographic memory, and Elizabeth (who, in the play, prefers him to all her other PMs) is eager to put his boast to the test. A book is needed. There are no books in the drawing room. (Uniquely, this scene takes place at Balmoral.) Elizabeth picks up the phone and just about barks her request that a book be sent in. No, it doesn’t matter which book. It appears, from the Queen’s need to hang on in silence, that staff has no idea where to find a book. This is a nice joke, one that some members of the audience pick up sooner than others. (There is, in fact, a library practically next door to the drawing room, no doubt stuffed with deadly but beautifully-bound folios and whatnot; but never mind.) The Queen is businesslike about her request. Some might think she is bossy. I don’t. I think that this fictional onstage queen is the kind of person who saves being a caring kind of person for moments when it’s needed, and I believe that Elizabeth the Actual takes the same line.

The thing about The Audience is not what Her Majesty In Fact thinks about it. The thing about The Audience is being in the same room with Helen Mirren while she pretends to be the Queen. There is something so magnificently cheeky, so gleeful, really, about her impersonation that, as with A Question of Attribution, your attention is drawn to a subtext: what would it be like if Elizabeth Windsor were on the stage, playing/being herself, and Helen Mirren waltzed on and took a seat, as if she were the prime minister? What if it were the case that, night after night, the first act of The Audience ends with Helen Mirren’s being crowned as Great Actress?

To put it another way, what does Helen Mirren think about The Audience? Well, you don’t have to ask. The other conceit of this play is that it takes a thoroughgoing professional to bring a thoroughgoing professional to life.