With our most beloved nonagenarian actress playing our late, beloved nonagenarian sovereign, this is a play in which to wallow in affectionate, if not too questioning, admiration and nostalgia.
Daisy Goodwin’s play goes behind the official façade of this most private monarch, in the company of her clothes designer, milliner and dresser. With a 70-year reign to cover, time is elastic, so the conceit is that the entire period is served by just three figures, based respectively on Hardy Amies, the Australian Freddie Fox and particularly docker’s daughter Angela Kelly who rose to become effectively Mistress of the Wardrobe.
Other royals get only a passing mention—Diana earning a sniff of disapproval from Kelly—while events roll by in the background: the miners’ strike, the IRA murder of Mountbatten, the Windsor fire, Liz Truss and the longer-life lettuce. Her Majesty cannot comment on any of them; instead, as she explains to her inner trio: "my clothes speak for me... I stand still, you colour me in."
Thus a tweed suit in British Rail check adorned with one of the world’s largest diamonds is enough to put down the over-dressed Wallis Simpson, daffodil yellow for Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales, Kelly green and shamrock broach for a visit to Ireland. And a controversial outfit in European blue with gold stars at the time of the Brexit referendum.
Anne Reid, who was 90 in May, cruises through the ages like a stately galleon, "indestructible as bubble gum" as she says of her character, who, heaven forbid that she ever should have worn a T-shirt, would probably have it proclaim "Keep calm and carry on" if she did. That is certainly the sage advice she gives to her adherents, the two other queens in the court, known simply as The Designer (Amies) and The Milliner (Fox)
There is something of a Malvolio in James Wilby as the former, as he prematurely anticipates an honour, and his milliner colleague, played by James Dreyfus, has the substance of pink blancmange as he flops obsequiously before the monarch at their first meeting. And both have their problems: The Designer believes in maintaining "the right silhouette" to hide his homosexuality and, although a war hero, is despised by his father who regarded his profession as effeminate; The Milliner mourns in heart-rending fashion the intimate friend dying of HIV who no longer recognises him.
Their plights are pivotal points in one’s understanding of the Queen’s common kindness in offering consolation, suggesting that Amies’s father is ashamed of his own prejudice, and that Fox, like herself, will come to terms with loss.
But rising above all, with an authority second only to her boss, is Caroline Quentin’s Dresser, ever-present with Elizabeth from rising to bedtime, who buys her underwear, wears in her desert boots for a visit to Arabia, stocks up her Queen of Sheba lipstick and will be there to lay her out after death.
Gigi to Her Maj, Mrs Danvers to the designers who resent her influence while bickering like cats, she bursts their bubble with Northern no-nonsense. So what is her reward for long service to the wealthiest woman in the land? Permission to remain in her home after Elizabeth’s death, a pin-cushion in the shape of a corgi and a pension—bestowed as a gift to which any normal employee would be automatically entitled.
My republican eyebrow twitched, but meanwhile, I would happily raise a flag or two, sing "God Save Her" to the miraculous Anne Reid, going on the road in her tenth decade, pulling in adoring audiences to regional theatres and providing life blood that supports the arts throughout the country. What a marvellous legacy that she continues to enrich.
The show continues its UK tour with dates in Southampton, Richmond, Guildford and Salford until August 2025.