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 Merchant of Venice (1936)

by William Shakespeare (adapted by Brigid Armour and Tracey-Ann Oberman)

seen at the Richmond Theatre on 9 April 2025

The most problematic aspects to modern eyes of The Merchant of Venice - its racism and anti-semitism - are confronted boldly in this re-imagining of the play set in London's East End in 1936 as the Jewish community there faced the increasing activism of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. The director Brigid Armour and the "first female Shylock" Tracy-Ann Oberman have adjusted and streamlined the play to fit this tense time not far out of living memory, and in doing so have shone a disturbing light on the play and the period.

In front of a backdrop representing the terraced house fronts of a typical East End street the play opens with a Passover supper celebrated by Shylock and her family and friends, with daughter Jessica asking the time-honoured questions (usually it is the youngest male child who performs this task, but none is present). It is interrupted by the first shouts of the baying mob, and then Shakespeare's text takes over with Antonio's world-weariness, his friends' easy badinage and Bassanio's importunity. For Portia's scenes a white gauze curtain is drawn across the back of the stage lending an insubstantial air to the setting of Belmont, but back in town it is always the East End, and there is little reference to Venice: Bassanio is even referred to as an Englishman.

Gobbo, the clownish servant who determines to leave Shylock's employ, is here Mary (Evie Hargreaves, doubling as Nerissa) rather than Lancelot, and there is no sign of the father met and hoodwinked in the street (no bad thing, as the scene needs to be exceptionally well managed in order not to be tedious). But the sense of Shylock's house being only a precarious safe place is enhanced by the encroaching Blackshirts: a drunken Gratiano (Xavier Starr) sporting the scarlet armband relieves himself against Shylock's door while shouting insults. No wonder Shylock urges her daughter to keep away from the windows, little realising that Jessica has decided to elope with Lorenzo.

In this setting, with misogyny added to the anti-semitism, and the jeering males increasingly colluding with the Blackshirts and adopting their uniform - even Antonio and Bassanio are wearing armbands by the time of the court scene - Shylock is all the more threatened and her "merry bond" a forlorn hope for some redress, ultimately forestalled by the legal nicety revealed by the young lawyer (Portia disguised) in court. The whole atmosphere of the play shows up the "Venetians" as an unpleasant and self-righteous lot, with the casual insouciance of their prejudices most in evidence in their treatment of Jessica. She is completely disdained by Lorenzo's male friends, and when she addresses Portia the latter rudely cuts her off (an interpolated exchange, I think): Portia is clearly an upper class anti-semite (and she has also evidenced an unpleasant disdain for the Prince of Morocco here re-imagined as a Maharajah).

In the trial scene Shylock's determination to execute the bond, followed by her utter humiliation, is loaded heavily with prejudice - the jeering of Gratiano at her discomfiture is particularly grating in this production - and she brokenly disappears from the scene by walking down in front of the first row of the audience while the two young lawyers persuade Bassanio and Gratiano to part with the rings which they swore would never leave their fingers.

Back in Belmont Lorenzo (Mikhail Sen) and Jessica (Gráinne Dromgoole) spar with their talk of past lovers. This scene can be played as a romantic and lyrical teasing between two youngsters in love, but nowadays it is often, as here, played to show a mounting unhappiness and strain between the two speakers. When the triumphant crowd returns from the city Jessica can hardly feel comfortable surrounded by black-shirted men. But the usual conclusion of the play - a perhaps wary reconciliation of the other two married couples after the debacles with the rings - is interrupted by the off-stage raucous crowd and a sudden collapse of all the characters into a group of doughty East Enders fighting off the fascists in the Battle of Cable Street, as described by Shylock herself.

This transposition on the whole works well, though some of the sound effects and silent projections of headlines and crowd scenes are a bit heavy-handed; the final account of community resistance is doubtless uplifting but has virtually nothing to do with the play. Of course some aspects of the play are sacrificed in order to re-shape it to the political scene of the 1930s. The emotional centre of the play rests on Shylock, a startlingly powerful performance by Tracy-Ann Oberman; we cannot engage very much with the fortune-hunting Bassanio (Gavin Fowler) or the frustrated if entitled Portia (Georgie Fellows), or even with Antonio (Joseph Millson) perhaps impossibly in love with Bassanio himself. The supporting cast are strong, but their characters are on the whole unappealing, a factor which is certainly present in the original play, but which is understandably highlighted here.