A country wracked with grief, queues to sign the books of condolence, a national treasure departed ... It is easy to imagine what will happen when Alan Bennett dies. In the meantime, Birmingham Rep has revived the piece in which he famously lampoons the Queen on stage.
Bennett's imagined dialogue between Her Majesty and the royal surveyor of pictures, Anthony Blunt, never directly refers to the Queen Mother, although Queen Mary's acquisitive habits come in for a bit of a ribbing. And Liza Goddard invests our reigning monarch with a truly magisterial performance.
This is really the queen Oscar Wilde would have wanted - a clipped, imperturbable dispenser of witticisms and withering put-downs. Discovering Blunt at work reshuffling the palace pictures, she remarks: "A monarch has been defined as someone who may sit down without looking behind them. But now one fears that the Chippendale will be out on exhibition."
Goddard not only articulates these lines beautifully in that familiar, high-pitched piping sound, but she also presents an uncanny physical match - sharing that slightly hamster-cheeked look of inarguable regality.
She is extremely well-matched, in David Grindley's eloquent production, by Robert Powell's imperious impersonation of Blunt, the aloof art historian with a history of espionage. Blunt was a bit of a cold fish and Powell's puffed-up stance resembles a large silver salmon standing on its tail. He makes chilling use of his occluded, ice-blue eyes, which glaze over as soon as he suspects the company to have fallen beneath his intellectual dignity. Timothy Kightley makes a fabulous job of the doltish police inspector sent to plague him.
This terse one-acter, A Question of Attribution, emerges as the superior partner in the double bill with its companion piece, An Englishman Abroad. But the earlier play is also distinguished by flawless performances from Goddard and Powell as the dissolute exile Guy Burgess and Coral Browne, the Australian actress who takes pity on him.
· Until April 20: Box office: 0121-236 4455.
