This isn’t an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but two queens do stand before me, grappling with ideas about the performance of gender and sexuality. This steely new play from Ella Hickson explores how obsessions with Elizabeth I’s beauty and virginity have clouded her legacy as a leader. The fact I’m sure these aren’t issues Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn have lost sleep over added a deep irony to its Election Day press night.
The play opens with a mischievous moment of daring: an older, more confident Elizabeth (Abigail Cruttenden) appears and dismisses the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – the candlelit replica venue it’s performed in – as ‘bulls***’. She’s joined on stage by Elizabeth (excellent Nina Cassells) as a 14-year-old princess, nervous, religious and exposed to manipulative forces. “Encouraging lust in men is an aggression,” she is told by step-mother Catherine Parr, not long after her husband has finished drunkenly perving on her. In 90 minutes, Hickson charts how Elizabeth’s single status was treated like a crisis throughout her rise to power and subsequent 44-year reign.
Natalie Abrahami’s production has a keen sense of atmosphere; at one point the room is plunged into complete darkness, evoking the anxiety of Elizabeth’s tower prison cell. Ben Stones’s costumes are beautiful too – exaggerated regal dresses adorned with Elizabeth’s instantly recognisable face. But modern theatrical gestures hint at a bolder play that never appears, becoming outweighed by a more conservative historical drama telling a story that already feels familiar.
Hickson is a deeply intelligent writer who can blaze through to big truths, and even on a lower wattage Swive offers smart and pertinent insights. In a world still largely led by men, it feels important to look closer at Elizabeth’s strategies for self-preservation, the mental gymnastics men employed to accept her as a female leader, and how those two combine.
Until February 15; shakespearesglobe.com
