BACK in the dark ages in Bournemouth, and every time a more sordid story emerged from the courts, my first editor used to delight us trainees with the mischievous quip “How unlike the home life of our own dear queen.”
This extraordinary woman was so much a part of all our lives for so long that her passing is still a deeply-felt moment – and it is the moment when Daisy Goodwin, screenwriter, producer and novelist, decided to begin her first-ever stage play, By Royal Appointment. It has opened in Bath at the start of its eight-venue UK tour, to rapturous (but less whooping than is now usual) approval from a packed audience.
Starring Anne Reid as Her Majesty, with Caroline Quentin as her fiercely dependable dresser, it also has James Wilby as the designer, James Dreyfus as the milliner and Grainne Dromgoole (daughter of director Dominic) as the curator and deliverer of some of the evening’s funniest lines.
As the stage lights up, The Dresser is about to leave the palace, her keys to the royal jewels, which she has faithfully tended and selected for decades, now useless. The lock has been changed during her late majesty’s funeral – it happens in the best circles! A bright new young curator arrives, eager to pick the grieving and displaced dresser’s brains about the clothes the queen wore and for which occasion, in preparation for an interactive exhibition.
The clock whizzes back to the redoubtable woman’s first encounter with the monarch. And the story of Her Majesty’s hidden communcations with her people is told, chronologically, from then until her death on the day after she met Liz Truss.
Basing her characters (partly) on Hardy Amies, Australian Frederick Fox and Liverpudlian Angela Kelly, Goodwin focusses on the meetings between the quartet over the years, as images of the occasions on which the clothes being discussed were worn are projected. At every leap forward, the curator intones some of the notable moments of that year. It’s a device we are accustomed to seeing in documentaries, and is used to some effect here.
By the time of the interval, after the death of Lord Mountbatten, I was wondering how it could be brought to an end. I needn’t have worried.
If the increasingly bitchy behaviour of the designer and milliner were getting aggravating … well they WERE getting aggravating, to the other characters. Anne Reid’s evolving depiction of Elizabeth II was not a caricature or even a performance, but more of an embodiment, and by the final scene it was almost as if we were IN that Balmoral room, awaiting the arrival of the Badly Thatched Boy and our shortest-serving PM.
Caroline Quentin showed how the bluff northerner grew in confidence, observing every detail of her 
working days until she knew by instinct what Her Majesty needed, wanted and didn’t want. The story goes that the real dresser wore-in the royal shoes so that the Queen didn’t get tired feet, and even adapted the clothes made by queenly men to fit the body of the Queenly woman, until she was able to take over the design responsibilities herself.
One of my colleagues pointed out that this was the perfect play for a Bath audience. I suspect it will be a play for many other audiences too, among them the hundreds of American escapees who fill London theatres. On in Bath until Saturday 14th June, the story it tells is recent history in which we feel involved and in which we can recognise real, human people and not media constructs.
GP-W
Photographs by Nobby Clark