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 Heresy of Love

by Helen Enmundson

seen at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on 3 August 2015

This production of the play (originally commissioned by the RSC in 2012) is directed by John Dove and features Naomi Frederick as Sister Juana, Sophia Nomvete as Juanita, Gwyneth Keyworth as Angelica, Gabrielle Lloyd as Mother Marguerita, Anthony Howell as Bishop Santa Cruz, Patrick Driver as Father Antonio and Phil Whitchirch as Archbishop Aguiar y Sejas.

The play concerns Mexico's first (17th century) playwright and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Hieronymite nun. The convents of Mexico were the refuge of many unmarried women, and some were renowned for the sophistication of some of their nuns. Sor Juana was highly intelligent, amassing a considerable library of theological and philosophical books; she also wrote plays and poems and had the favour of the vice-regal court.

However, the arrival of a new archbishop sent from Madrid threatens the whole system of court patronage and the appreciation and commissioning of secular works from religious houses. The archbishop wishes to root out such dangerous accommodations and compromises with the world, and is especially critical of any woman who presumes to meddle in masculine affairs such as intellectual thought. With a local bishop frustrated in his hopes of preferment, who determines to use any prop that comes to hand to discomfit the archbishop, the scene is set for a critical confrontation of ideas, politics and personal hopes.