By Royal Appointment

by Daisy Goodwin

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 29 July 2025

Dominic Dromgoole directs Anne Reid as the Queen, Caroline Quentin as the Dresser, James Wilby as the Designer, James Dreyfus as the Milliner and Gráinne Dromgoole as the Curator in Daisy Goodwin's play about Queen Elizabeth II as revealed through the clothes she wore on fifteen occasions during her reign.

The conceit is an interesting one - that the Queen, bound by constitutional proprieties not to reveal personal opinions, nevertheless revealed something by means of the clothes she wore for certain occasions. Furthermore, she trusted her designer (Hardy Amies) to devise clothes that would suit both her and the occasions for which they were designed; and she relied increasingly on her dresser (Angela Kelly), here presented as an often fierce and opinionated presence in the private apartments of the monarch.

The occasions range from the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 to Prince Philip's funeral in 2021 and the Queen's last greeting of a new Prime Minister just days before her own death in 2022. These scenes allow for glances at significant events such as the murder of Lord Mountbatten, the impact of Princess Diana (but not her death), and the Brexit referendum, as well as more personal crises such as the frustrations of her designer and her milliner and the impact of the AIDS crisis on the latter.

The trouble with the play is that it is too formulaic. The curator sets the scene each time, mentioning the year and the costume, and then the significant cultural or political events of the time, some of which are frankly bizarre choices. The rivalry between the three characters attending the Queen simmers throughout,  without really developing into character studies or a serious narrative arc. The Queen herself remains largely as she has always been presented by authors desperate to invest her with personality without overstepping the mark: straightforward, serious about her duties but often waspish about their incidental absurdities. But on the occasions when her staff revealed deep personal feelings her role as almost a counsellor figure seemed just too neat and idealistic.

The first half flags as the routine presentation of the material establishes itself without fully taking flight. Part of the problem must be Anne Reid herself, who at 90 years of age is simply not credible as a woman in her mid-forties to early sixties. To make matters worse, the set, a series of diaphanous curtains on an otherwise almost bare stage, gave no assistance with the acoustics, and it was occasionally quite hard to hear what was being said. (I attended the first performance of the run at this theatre, so the cast may not have been familiar with the auditorium; the play is on tour.) The pace picked up in the second half as events fell more securely within the adult memory of the audience, and hence had a more certain resonance, though there were rather too many appeals to knowing laughter in hindsight.

Unfortunately, with the far more intriguing portrayals of the Queen provided by Alan Bennett in A Question of Attribution, or by Peter Morgan's The Audience as predecessors in this field (to say nothing of The Queen on film or The Crown on television), By Royal Appointment seems rather innocuous and derivative.

Women and Troy

by David Stuttard after Euripides

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildfords on 27 July 2025

David Stuttard created these dramatic readings from Euripides's tragedy The Trojan Women, supplemented by some speeches from Andromache and his reconstructions of the lost Alexandros, partly in response to the 9-11 attacks in 2001: the notion of the passengers on the planes being trapped inside a vehicle reminded him, he said, of the warriors in the wooden horse, though the analogy is by no means exact. However, the theme of the brutality and inhumanity of war remains all too relevant today.

The readings, given by Siân Phillips as Hekabe (Hecuba) and Rachel Donovan speaking variously as Athene, Cassandra, Andromache and Helen, reveal the complex web of fate whereby the infant Trojan prince Alexandros (the other name for Paris) was sent to be exposed on the slopes of Mount Ida to forestall a prophecy that he would ruin the city of Troy, but instead was found and raised by kindly shepherds. Later, having received Helen of Sparta as a reward (or bribe) for judging Aphrodite to be the fairest of the three goddesses Athene, Aphrodite and Hera, he did indeed ruin the city.

The action of The Trojan Women takes place soon after the fall of the city as the female members of the royal family face enslavement and degradation; Hekabe reels under successive blows of bad news, in particular the callous murder of her young grandson Astyanax (the son of Hector and Andromache), thrown from the city walls by the victorious Greeks in case he should grow up to be a threat to them.

Even presented as 'dramatic readings' from two lecterns the story is compelling and the grief and despair raw and intense. The two actors switched from deep identification with their characters to detached commentary, and in the Q and A session afterwards remarked that in some ways it was easier to be 'reading' rather than 'declaiming' or acting in a full production, because it allowed for these shifts and removed the problems of staging, costuming and movement: all was dependent on the poetry, which was admirably translated and adapted.

The readings lasted only an hour or so but the grim tale was vividly presented. In the week that I saw this performance, not directly referred to but nevertheless clear in my mind as I listened to Hekabe mourn over the broken body her little grandson, were the photographs of the children starving in Gaza. The ghastliness of war, and the ease with which its perpetrators justify any barbarity they choose to inflict on one another, has hardly changed in 2500 years.

The Comedy of Errors

by William Shakespeare 

and

A Company of Rascals

by Phil Porter

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 24 and 25 July 2025 

The Guildford Shakespeare Company has created a fascinating double bill directed by Joanna Read and designed by Neil Irish, whereby a new play by Phil Porter, A Company of Rascals, is entwined round Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. After a scene-setting prologue which takes place on the banks of the River Wey outside the theatre, the Comedy is enacted in the main auditorium. Audiences for both plays see the new prologue and the Comedy's first scene, after which those seeing Rascals leave the auditorium and are taken to three different locations nearby to watch what the characters of the Comedy are imagined to be doing when they are not on stage; the two audiences are reintegrated for the final scene of the Comedy in which "all is revealed".

Shakespeare's play involves proliferating misunderstandings when two sets of identical twins, each separated in infancy due to a complicated shipwreck, are continually mistaken for each other not only by the residents of Ephesus where one of each pair lives as master and servant, but also by each other, because the other pair (also a master and servant) have arrived unexpectedly in town. By an improbable sleight of hand, which can't be called into question without destroying the whole basis of the farce, each master has retained the name Antipholus, and each servant the name Dromio, and each named twin dresses alike, thus allowing all the mistakes (or errors) to occur until finally all four are on stage together - and even then there is still room for confusion. 

The new play, set variously in the Centaur Inn (where the visitors have chosen to stay), in Doctor Pinch's premises, and in the Porpentine (where the resident Antipholus has dined when unable to enter his own house), capitalises on the mistaken identities wherever possible, but also follows the progress of the golden chain commissioned by the Ephesian Antipholus through many more hands than merely the goldsmith and the visiting Antipholus as seen in the Comedy, and also follows the continuing misfortunes of Egeon, the elderly Syracusan merchant arrested at the beginning of the play. Where the Comedy relies on chance meetings and displays of verbal wit, Rascals introduces madcap physical comedy with swapped bags, outright chicanery, and bravura charlatanry.

The cast of twelve expertly manages to perform both plays at once (though the audience of course can only see one of them at a time), aided in the case of Comedy by some extended pauses between scenes which are gloriously filled with 1960s pop songs (it's a modern-dress production). Cleverly, the new play focusses more on the minor characters of the Comedy, giving particular prominence to the jailer, and ludicrously making him the twin brother of Doctor Pinch to explain cast doubling, and introducing a few new characters to fill out the town scene.

Fortuitously I saw Comedy first and Rascals second, which I think is probably the most satisfactory order: the new play enriches the older even in retrospect, and its fast-paced double-dealings and general context require familiarity with the Comedy for maximum effect. The two together made for a really enjoyable theatrical experience.