Queen Anne

by Helen Edmundson

seen at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 8 August 2017

Natalie Abrahami directs Emma Cunniffe as Queen Anne and Romola Garai as Sarah Churchill in this new RSC production transferred from Stratford. It follows the difficult relationship between the two women from the last years of William III's reign (when Anne was heir to the throne) until about 1708 soon after the death of her husband Prince George of Denmark. When Anne becomes Queen, England is soon involved in a European War, while domestically the Queen sees the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland as a personal triumph.

Anne, insecure and ill-educated, is seen by many as biddable and stupid, but she has a clear sense of her own entitlement and her duty, even as those around her try to manipulate her for their own political advantage. Her ambitious friend from their youth, Sarah Jennings, has married the brilliant soldier John Churchill - Earl, eventually to be Duke, of Marlborough - and her own driving ambitions conjoined with his make her dangerously impatient with the dynamics of being the special friend of a woman she has come to despise, but who is nonetheless the monarch.

The play has a great deal of unfamiliar political knowledge to impart, which it does through several lampooning songs performed by the 'wits' of the Inns of Court in a creditable pastiche of eighteenth century satire and buffoonery. The viciousness and the smugness of the elite is glanced at, but not seriously interrogated, in these scenes. At a higher level, the court of the King is poisoned by the antipathy between him and his sister-in-law, a state of affairs exacerbated by her chosen stance of claiming to be unfit to respond to his demands. She is both physically unwell - bent over and limping on hideously gouty legs - and intellectually at a disadvantage; Emma Cunniffe portrays brilliantly the stubbornness of a woman who knows that her only weapon is to remain stubborn even if it infuriates everyone around her.

Sarah Churchill believes she can make the Princess bend to her will; Romola Garai is expert at depicting a lively impassioned and clever woman exerting a steely determination to get her own way, though occasionally she looks too modern in her stance for the clothes she is wearing. 

The machinations of the emerging Whig and Tory parties (represented respectively by the Churchills and Lord Chancellor Sidney Godolphin on the one side and Speaker Robert Harley on the other) are cleverly given dramatic focus by the presence of Abigail Hill in the Queen's household. She is a poor cousin of Sarah's on her mother's side, but also (unbeknownst to Sarah) of Mr Harley on her father's, and so perfectlyplaced to tip the balance of the Queen's attention and consequently her political stance. This helps also to emphasise the intensely personal nature of political rivalry at the time; jockeying for the Queen's attention is vital for everyone concerned, and Sarah's proud boasts of becoming the cynosure of posterity at the end of the play mask a deep panic at having finally lost the friendship that she regarded so cavalierly at the height of her power over the Queen.

The set - a versatile panelled room - and costume design (Hannah Clark) gave an authentic feel, though the language of the play lacks the pointed panache of early eighteenth century speech (so far as it can be determined from prose writing of the time). The presence of both Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe as minor characters seemed a bit more like name-dropping than serious characterisation, though admittedly they were only bit players in the main action of the play. What really stays in the mind is the central difficult relationship between two passionate but fundamentally ill-matched women, in a situation where personal ambition proved inadequate in the face of inherited position.