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.

The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville Theatre on 9 October 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some related works; this is the fourth major production. Michael Fentiman directs Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Jack, Fehinti Balogun as Algernon, Sophie Thompson as Lady Bracknell, Pippa Nixon as Gwendolen, Fiona Button as Cecily, Stella Gonet as Miss Prism and Jeremy Swift as Canon Chasuble in this, perhaps the most brilliant play of its kind.

Almost nothing can detract from the perfect poise of Wilde's writing; the aphorisms and witty repartee, the clever inversions that reveal social snobberies and prejudices with rapier-thrust accuracy, flow from the lips of almost all the characters as the absurdities of the situation mount up and then are almost as absurdly resolved. It would seem that the only things counting against it are its reputation and the shadow of some overpowering performances from the past (for example, Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell).

In many ways this production hits the right note, with the cast on the whole managing the delivery of the lines more successfully than in the other two productions I have seen. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Pippa Nixon and in particular Sophie Thompson are the best at this, though Fiona Button is too modern in her deportment for a teenaged girl of that time, and unfortunately it is clear that Wilde's vocal style works best with a late nineteenth-century physical restraint.  

However, I have serious reservations about some of the directorial and design decisions. The social comedy relies on the social context which it is satirising, and it is dangerous to ignore this; false notes are an unwelcome distraction. The first false note is the presence of a peculiarly explicit painting of two naked men grappling one another, which is given prominence in Algernon's living room. It is simply inconceivable that any gentleman would have had such a thing on public display in a room which ladies would be likely to visit (especially, perhaps, relations).

More seriously, the relationship between Algernon and Lane (his butler) is conceived as far more intimate than it should be. Lane remains on stage for a considerable stretch when the stage directions explicitly indicate that he is not there, and Algernon lights him a cigarette, offers him sherry and indulges in the occasional kiss. It is just plain wrong, a complete distraction from the real business of the play, and a needless sacrifice of any genuine social comment that might be made of the badinage between them, which is if anything a precursor of the Jeeves and Wooster situation, not the cover for a surreptitious sexual fling. 

A similar social barrier is needlessly crossed in a small dumbshow scene in which Cecily shares an illicit cigarette with Moulton the gardener behind Miss Prism's back. Cecily may have a wild imagination, but the sheer impropriety of this idea threatens to ruin the whole ambience in which she moves. Equally the presentation of Merriman as an outdoors servant (open shirt and no jacket) overburdened with the supposed Ernest's luggage, when he is obviously a superior house servant who would have ordered the footmen to deal with the luggage, is a serious misreading of how a wealthy country household would have been run. 

Finally, the marvellous scene in which Cecily and Gwendolen descend from superficial effusiveness to icy politeness to silent hostility is just about ruined by the crassness of the sugar and cake business at the end. (Indeed the consumption of food in general too often degenerated into incipient custard pie moments when again absolute adherence to social norms generates the comedy.) No well brought up young lady of that period would grab a tea cake and pull it apart with her hands and then allow a servant to touch it while handing it over even to a rival. The whole point of the scene is that the ritual of afternoon tea is pursued with absolute correctness but without paying attention to what the guest has asked for.

It's curious that I accept many directorial interventions in modern Shakespeare productions, but I think that attempts to introduce subplots into Oscar Wilde's plays - which all three productions that I have seen in this season have done - are a distracting failure. There is simply no room for them; the plays are not about secret romances belowstairs, and even less about shenanigans between upstairs and downstairs, and to interpolate such things as a modish modern joke or knowing social comment is simply gratuitous. The catastrophe of what Wilde himself suffered in a homophobic society is very well known, but it does neither him nor his social comedies any favours to pretend that they are the place to show what could not in reality be shown or referred to.

It's a pity, really, that these gem-likef plays should not have been trusted to entertain today's audiences on their own merits.

An Ideal Husband

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville THeatre on 5 June 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some associated works; this is the third major production. Jonathan Church directs Sally Britton as Lady Chiltern, Nathaniel Parker as Sir Robert Chiltern, Faith Omole as Miss Mabel Chiltern, Frances Barber as Mrs Cheveley, Susan Hampshire as Lady Markby, Edward Fox as the Earl of Caversham and Freddie Fox as his son Viscount Goring.

This play has more substance than Lady Windermere's Fan (reviewed in March this year); though perhaps this is a modern conclusion, since the potential scandal driving the plot is one of political corruption rather than the revelation of illegitimate birth. Mrs Cheveley wishes to blackmail Lord Chiltern (a member of the government) into supporting a shady foreign deal because she has irrefutable evidence of the fact that he based his fortune on selling a Cabinet secret many years before. Although she is eventually foiled, and we are on the whole glad that this is the case (since she is herself hardly a moral paragon), the situation nevertheless raises many pertinent questions about loyalty, honesty, public power and private integrity, and there is no doubt that she scores many points.

Lady Windermere's Fan

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville Theatre on 20 March 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some associated works; this is the second major production (after A Woman of No Importance). Kathy Burke directs Grace Molony as Lady Windermere, Joshua James as Lord Windermere, Samantha Spiro as Mrs Erlynne and Jennifer Saunders as the Duchess of Berwick.

Wilde uses the conventions of a melodrama to skewer social pretensions and at the same time to criticise unthinking adherence to moral absolutes. Mrs Erlynne is the catalyst for a crisis in the Windermere marriage. But most of the crisis is played out according to the mores of the time - the wife virtuous and condemnatory of social and ethical impropriety, the husband floundering in his attempts to do what's best in a situation where his natural presumption of masculine authority collides with his entrapment in blackmail. Curiously, although the audience is soon aware of the secret causing all the mayhem, Lady Windermere remains oblivious and some other major deceptions are also not unmasked.

Pericles

by William Shakespeare (and George Wilkins)

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 24 March 2016

Dominic Dromgoole directs James Garnon (Pericles), Jessica Baglow (Marina), Dorothea Myer-Bennett (Thaisa and Dionyza), Simon Armstrong (Antiochus and Simonides), Fergal McElherron (Helicanus and the Pander), Dennis Herdman (Bolt), Kirsty Woodward (Lychorida and the Bawd), Steffan Donnelly (Lysimachus) and Shiela Reid (Gower) as part of a season of Shakespeare's four 'romance' plays.

Pericles, the only play commonly attributed to Shakespeare but not included in the First Folio edition of his plays, is actually a collaboration, and the text is thought to be woefully defective in certain places. However, despite its episodic and even disjointed plot, and its reliance on fantastical coincidences and unlikely turns of events, it can be a very satisfactory theatrical experience.

The Tempest

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 15 March 2016

Dominic Dromgoole directs Tim McMullan (Prospero), Phoebe Pryce (Miranda), Dharmesh Patel (Ferdinand), Pippa Nixon (Ariel) Fisayo Akinade (Caliban), Trevor Fox (Stephano) and Dominic Rowan (Trinculo) as part of a season of Shakespeare's four 'romance' plays.

A play which starts on a boat engulfed by a terrifying storm, and continues entirely with scenes on an island, might seem a tall order for an intimate candle-lit space with a highly decorated  wooden screen at the back of the stage and no sense of the natural world about it. However, the storm was brilliantly staged in semi-darkness, with crew and passengers careering across the stage in unison as if the whole edifice were tilting with the waves. The only questionable gambits were to have a large stylised picture of a storm displayed, with Prospero in front of it with his staff, before the action began, and to have Ariel swinging on a lantern above during the storm itself. This weakened the important revelation in the second scene that the storm, so realistically presented, is in fact only a concoction of Prospero's art.

Measure for Measure

by William Shakespeare

seen at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on 28 June 2015

This production is directed by Dominic Dromgoole and features Mariah Gale as Isabella, Kurt Egyiawan as Angelo, Dominic Rowan as the Duke, Joel MacCormack as Claudio, Dean Nolan as Elbow and Brendan O'Hea as Lucio. It is presented in 16th century dress to underline the conflict between Puritans and the more bawdy elements of society.

There is plenty of raucous business to keep a good-humoured audience happy; as the musicians are warming up, two houses are wheeled into the groundling space, and bawds and their pimps start crying for trade. When a couple enters either house, it starts rocking most suggestively. Later, when Angelo decrees that suburban houses of ill-repute are to be demolished, these are collapsed and wheeled off.