If your history lessons excluded Queen Anne or reduced her to a footnote, you can now compensate by meeting the real women in this RSC production of Helen Edmundson’s enthralling new play.
Roll over the Elizabeth and Victoria drama industry, there’s a new queen on the block with a captivating tale of passion and politics, told with deep psychological insight courtesy of surviving personal letters, and set against the scurrilous journalism, satire and licence of the time.
Firstly though, the commonly paraded facts. Anne was born the youngest daughter of James II in 1665. Considered shy and dull, she was under-educated, but given a profound belief in the Anglican faith.
With her father’s deposition in 1688 for trying to restore Catholicism, Anne supported the joint-monarchy of brother-in-law/cousin William III and her elder sister, Mary II, but resented their attempts to downplay her importance.
Despite seventeen pregnancies by her husband, Prince George of Denmark, she did not produce an heir and, affected by severe ill-health, became semi-immobile and of enormous girth,
After the deaths of Mary and William, Anne reigned from 1702 until her own demise in 1714, but due to her inexperience and openness to close female friendships, was regarded as easily influenced.
The reality, and here it unfolds tantalizing before you, is of the gradual development, from hesitancy to natural authority of an estimable ruler, in a reign faced by extreme parliamentary excesses.
The Whigs supported the commercial sector, Protestant non-conformists and the War of Spanish Succession. The anti-war Tories stood for the landed gentry and the Anglican Church and harboured sympathies for the deposed regime.
Anne is shown in a whirlwind of emotion being manipulated by passionate, but probably innocent female relationships. At first by Whig supporter Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough and then by Abigail Hill, another lady of her household and a Tory.
From all this there emerges two candidates for the tally of historic powerful women and two unforgettable performances, Emma Cunniffee captures the very root of Anne’s awkwardness and determined goodness of spirit, as she learns to play the political and the emotional game.
Natascha McElhone as Sarah ironically looks every part an empress, with her lavishly dressed tall figure, exuberant blonde hair and domineering manner. And she too makes a telling stage transformation, driven by an embittered and illogical resentment of the queen following the death of her son.
Director Natalie Abrahami expertly oversees scenes which effortlessly switch from personal and political maneuvering to wild singing and dancing satire led by Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe – cavorting which makes Spitting image seem like Blue Peter.
And a whole intimate world is revealed, with Robert Cavanah as the great general, the Duke of Marlborough, revealed in domestic vulnerability and not the master of his own palace.
As Anne’s husband, Hywel Morgan is endearing as a caring bumbling fool in a warm loving marriage. Beth Park as the humbly born Abigail Hill, is a huge presence combating Sarah’s exuberance with sour truth.
And Jonathan Brodbent as her Tory minster master, weasels out every sophistry known to politics, with his standard answer to controversial questions: ‘Yes, no, or perhaps maybe.’
The conclusion after 2 hours 20 minutes seems a little abrupt, with Sarah Marlborough delivering a diatribe against her queen, and lauding herself as the woman history will remember.
But by then the audience know the truth about Anne as a woman who achieved much in a male dominated age, securing the Act of Union with Scotland, choosing astute ministers and generally helping to create the framework that made Great Britain great.
It is always tempting to display the struggles of old as simple and quaint. They never are, and this entertaining production is a passport into understanding the last of the Stuarts. ★★★★☆ Derek Briggs 10th December 2015
