Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II
London. Queen Elizabeth II in a private chat with David Cameron? I would love to be a fly on the wall when the seasoned monarch and the freshman prime minister gossip! Now I can be - by watching “The Audience”, a new play in previews in London’s West End.
“How’s the baby?”, Cameron asks and the Queen replies: “Which baby?”
The play is fast and funny, with lots of one-liners on stage and laughter in the auditorium. The comedy is a renewed cooperation between the playwright Peter Morgan and the actress, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the same person in 2006: Helen Mirren is “The Queen”. In this case now we see a parade of prime ministers of the Queen’s reign, 12 in total so far. It is based on a curious tradition: the British monarch gives the head of government an audience of twenty minutes every Tuesday. It’s a private conversation and it stays private. Playwright Peter Morgan (“Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen”) did some research and thinks Winston Churchill started it. He came to see George VI regularly during the war, and from 1952 kept up the meetings with the young queen. In this country without a written constitution, this is now unwritten law.
We meet Churchill on stage in his first audience with the future Elizabeth II before her coronation, which he advises her to postpone for a year. She lashes out: “I think you want me to prepare better to be Queen in order for you to be in power longer.” But Churchill at least is her cup of tea, unlike Margaret Thatcher, the only female prime minister. The two most powerful women of Britain fall out over Thatcher’s tough stand against sanctions on South Africa and her confrontation with striking coal miners. We see Thatcher stomping and fuming on stage, while the queen presses her lips in a thin line of disapproval. The only thing the two women share is a love for black handbags.
The Queen’s favourite PM is not a Tory, as one might have suspected, but Harold Wilson. The working class PM of the Sixties and Seventies arrives at his first royal session with a Polaroid camera to get a snapshot with the Queen for his wife. The monarch takes a liking to the lowly man and even invites him to her Scottish hunting retreat of Balmoral and almost – almost – cries when he tells her that he got Alzheimer’s.
The prime minister whom the Queen hated the most is unfortunately not allowed on stage at all. It is not clear to us commoners whether playwright Peter Morgan missed out Tony Blair to please the Queen or because he was simply tired of Blair. The former Labour party star has been in the limelight long enough.
But the real star of “The Audience” is the actress who plays the Queen: Helen Mirren received an Oscar for her performance of Elizabeth II. in Stephen Frear’s “The Queen” in 2006. For her it’s a home game. As the curtain opens the actress sits on a lemon yellow imperial armchair, black handbag right next to her and a tiny little smile on her face. Helen Mirren is, no doubt, the better queen.
She plays Elizabeth II with quick wit: “We do not get to resign”, Queen Mirren sighs once: “Unlike the Pope.” And although the real monarch would never think of abdicating for her tree-hugging son Charles, the play leaves room for doubt. Is the splendid Buckingham Palace in the end more a big prison than a home? Very much at the back of the stage, remotely placed in a faraway room, we see two tiny thrones in red velvet. The real power of this Queen is, indeed, very, very small.
"So what am I?”, she asks herself at the end: “A postage stamp with a pulse?”
“The Audience” with Helen Mirren plays now at the Gielgud Theatre in London, but will be screened live – as part of National Theatre Live - into cinemas in England and across the world on June 13th.
Helen Mirren wins Olivier Award as best actress on April 28: