It is nearly twenty years since Alan Bennett’s vivid theatrical portrait charting the life and mental health of the late 18th-century monarch first opened at the National Theatre. A play in which the Prince of Wales bemoans his plight as a king in waiting - “it’s not a position, it’s a predicament” - strikes the identical contemporary resonance, though a reforming Prime Minister who craves another five years to fulfil his ambitions is even more pertinent now than when the play first opened and Tony Blair was not even leader of the Labour Party yet.
Bennett’s play is an imaginative historical documentary that has a timeless appeal for the insights it offers into court politics, then and now, and its warm, touching portrait of the cosy domesticity of the monarch with his Mrs Queen (as he calls her) that is contrasted with the grasping ambitions both of his son and his entourage of crackpot physicians, who torture him as much as they seek to cure him.
But while Nicholas Hytner’s original production for the National Theatre had a sweeping, panoramic forward motion (and not just in the king’s stools that are examined in such minute detail by one of his attending doctors), this sometimes scrappy new touring version exposes the episodic nature of the play that make it sometimes seem like a screenplay for the film it actually became.
With two opposing sets of coloured curtains endlessly trundled across the stage to divide scenes, there’s a crippling visual monotony to the production; and budgetary limitations also mean that, though it stretches to 13 actors, all but five of them have to double.
Simon Ward, looking like a permanently baffled Ann Widdecombe, lacks the defining pathos that the late Nigel Hawthorne brought to both the original stage and film incarnations. And while the Whigs prove a problem for the King, the cast have to do battle with the worst wigs I’ve seen on a stage in some time: they look like plastic bicycle helmets.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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