Queen (Assembly Rooms, Drawing Room) is a play about Queen Victoria, using her letters and diaries as sources. We see her as a young princess initially – a very much ‘amused’ teenager who doesn’t much like her school work, unless her teacher is handsome and engaging. We see her transition to young Queen and then into her widowhood and old age. The drama is played by two actors – each playing Victoria and other parts too, with slight tweaks to costume along the way.
The young Victoria is played beautifully and she sparkles when talking about the young men who come into her life. She is not the archetypal Victoria we feel we know so much about. The older and aging Queen has been so extensively chronicled already and so caricatured, that it makes it much harder to tell us anything new. The older, slower, sadder Victoria was never likely to be as engaging as the young, flighty princess and yet the private life and the expectations put upon her as Queen and Empress of India are well played.
Queen tackles a story that has been told and portrayed so many times before, that bringing it to life yet again is difficult. You can invent new crimes to solve for beloved detectives; you can imagine what might have happened to a monarch in medieval times; but a well-documented fairly recent monarch’s life leaves less room for the imagination. We know she was not amused, was madly in love with Albert and bereft when he died. We know about John Brown and also her Munshi. What was left to say? She didn’t like babies – hardly a surprise. She wished she’d had more time with Albert – that’s a given.
If this had been a ‘new’ story, the show would have taken credit for presenting it in an easy-to-understand format, performed more than competently. As it is, Queen didn’t seem to offer anything we’ve not seen or heard before and that’s a shame.
