Peter Viney's Blog

By Peter Morgan

Directed by Stephen Daldry
Design by Bob Crowley
Music by Paul Englishby

Gielgud Theatre, London 2013

NT AT HOME, Re-broadcast 2026

CAST

Helen Mirren- Queen Elizabeth II
Paul Ritter- John Major
Nathaniel Parker- Gordon Brown
Richard McCabe- Harold Wilson
Edward Fox – Winston Churchill
Michael Elwyn – Sir Anthony Eden
Hadyn Gwynne- Margaret Thatcher
Rufus Wright- David Cameron
David Peart- James Callaghan
Geoffrey Beevers – Equerry
Bebe Cave – Young Elizabeth
Charlotte Moore- Bobo McDonald

NT At Home is a bargain. For less than the price of one streamed to cinema NT broadcast you have a month’s access.

This was an early National Theatre LIVE, first broadcast in 2013. It went on to Broadway in 2015, with script changes (Tony Blair replacing James Callaghan). Helen Mirren won Best Actress in the Evening Standard Awards and in the Olivier Awards. Richard McCabe was Best Supporting Actor as Harold Wilson. Both won the Tony Award for Best Actor and Best Actress in New York in 2015.

There is a direct line with Peter Morgan and the queen, starting with the film The Queen, in 2006. That centred on the death of Diana and Tony Blair’s attempts to guide the royals through the subsequent process. Helen Mirren was the Queen and Michael Sheen was Tony Blair.

So Helen Mirren went on to the stage play, and Tony Blair was eliminated (been there, done that), though there are disparaging references to him from other characters.

Then we get the extreme mileage because Peter Morgan then created the massive Netflix series The Crown, taking us through six seasons and three actresses playing the Queen. That also keeps returning to the Queen’s weekly audience with the Prime Minister.

In the stage play, The Audience, Helen Mirren has to do the full sixty years, 1952 to 2013 on her own. The costume and wig changes are near miraculous. They are so fast. The wig designer must be brilliant, as there could be no time to pin them in. Still, she is either walking slowly or seated. Also older, she’s padded, which will be part of the frock. The Queen is the centre of the play, and apart from those incredibly fast costume changes, she’s always there. She also bounces back and forth in age.

It’s non-chronological, though the cast list above shows the sequence of Prime Ministers in the play. It’s not really about politics but rather in dealing with personalities.

It starts with John Major, and it brings out a theme, that she was more comfortable with the less assertive ones ( Major, Brown) than the assertive (Churchill, Eden, Thatcher). Wilson becomes the leading light because he can be both. Major is beautifully awkward, and he and the Queen empathise over a mutual lack of O levels.

Then Nathaniel Parker is Gordon Brown, and has perfected Brown’s OCD tongue into cheek moves. This is where we get the Tony Blair references, and Blair had been covered thoroughly in the 2006 film. I especially liked the Queen commenting on ‘Cheryl Blair’ and having to be corrected. My personal opinion is that Blair was the most devious of the lot and the one who forced through the biggest lie of the lot.

The play reiterates what many believe, and which The Crown continues. Harold Wilson was her favourite among the Prime Ministers. Me, too. When I was at the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC looking at the names of my contemporaries, I said a silent blessing to Harold Wilson for saving my British generation from that. Wilson also gets three stage appearances, the most. Richard McCabe has long been a favourite actor, ever since we saw him as Puck in John Caird’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Edward Fox’s natural gravitas and voice make him a perfect Churchill, though he looks nothing like him in stature.

Anthony Eden starts an interesting thread with lying about plotting to attack the Suez canal, but it’s not followed through to Harold Wilson rightly refusing to join the Biafra and Vietnam wars and Tony Blair lying to cabinet and parliament about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or Cameron joining the attack on Libya.

Hadyn Gwynne is Margaret Thatcher, an astonishing and terrifying performance. We note that none of the cast were “look-a-likes but they got the hair, the clothes, and most importantly the voices and the walk. Both Edward Fox as Winston Churchill and Haydn Gwynne as Mrs Thatcher perfected the walk. Haydn Gwynne also perfected the stance and that stare.

David Cameron doesn’t get named. As an old Etonian who is said to have known the younger royals at Sandringham, he would have had an ‘in’ with the queen. I remember the world cup bid (failed) where Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham had obviously bonded as a relaxed trio.

Some PMs get skipped. Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Hume, then Edward Heath, then Tony Blair. Perhaps Morgan didn’t want to focus on four Tories.

Callaghan nearly gets skipped but appears at the end protesting that he’s been forgotten. I forgot him too. Easily done. Rufus Wright was switched from David Cameron to Tony Blair when the production moved to Broadway and Blair replaces Callaghan, possibly on the grounds that Americans wouldn’t have heard of poor Jim. We were in the USA while they were bombing Iraq. I was greeted at a gas station by guys in Dodge trucks who heard my accent, and shook my hand vigorously and told me, ‘We really love your President Blair.’

Edward Heath seems a missed opportunity. I think that there may be two reasons. First, with the whole Private Eye “Grocer Heath” and the laugh and shoulder shudder, he easily lapses into comedy. More importantly, 2015 saw those false accusations against him. They’d been muttered about before so maybe they wanted to avoid showing him. It is incredibly unfair that the sexual (whether hetero or homo) refuse to believe that some people are genuinely asexual- Edward Heath and Cliff Richard being prime examples.

It is about the Queen and about this diverse bunch of people. Harold Wilson (Richard McCabe) and Margaret Thatcher (Hadyn Gywnne) leap out as the huge personalities. That was true in the political sphere too.

The second half starts in Scotland, a pleasant change of set. We see more and more of the ten year old Elizabeth, conversing with her later self.

Mirren is the star. It is a phenomenal performance.

****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID IN 2013

Daily Telegraph *****

The Times ****
The Independent ****
Evening Standard ****
Metro ****

LINKS ON THIS SITE

HELEN MIRREN
The Duke (film) 2022
O! Lucky Man (film) 1973
Reds 2 (film) 2013
The Debt (film) 2011

RICHARD McCABE
The Duke (film) 2022
Gladiator II (film) 2024
Cyrano (film) 2022
1917 (film)
Fortune’s Fool by Turgenev, Old Vic 2014
A Little Hotel on The Side, by Feydau Bath 2013

HAYDN GWYNNE
HeddaTesman, Chichester 2019
Coriolanus, RSC 2017 (Volumnia)
Women on The Verge of A Nervous Breakdown, 2015
Richard III- Kevin Spacey, Old Vic (Queen Elizabeth)

EDWARD FOX
An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde, Classic Spring 2018
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, Chichester Festival Theatre, 2014

PAUL RITTER
Operation Mincemeat (film)

MICHAEL ELWYN
The Country Wife, Chichester 2018
Much Ado About Nothing, Old Vic 2013 (Leonato)

RUFUS WRIGHT
Much Ado About Nothing, NT 2022 (Leonato)