Last-minute tucks and additions had been prepared for The Audience. Auditions were held for an Ed Miliband. He might have been needed to join the list of PMs who have had weekly confidential meetings with Kristin Scott Thomas’s Queen. Not required, as it turned out, though a new scene between the Queen and David Cameron was added the day after the election.
Peter Morgan’s play, first staged two years ago and now playing on Broadway with Helen Mirren as the monarch, is a smooth vehicle for actors, who are required to mimic rather than embody their characters.
Mirren and Scott Thomas are witty castings. Beauties who have proved that maturity does not have to mean frumpiness (is there a male equivalent for this word?), they are startling when they appear with dangling handbag, pearls and stockily planted legs. They come from different ends of the spectrum. Mirren reined – reigned? – in her fire. She was a simmering sceptre. Scott Thomas begins with icy poise and bolts on a number of recognisable regal modes. She has a terrifying, all-purpose beam – the brighter, the more blank – and a deft way with the gentle correction: a swivel of the lips does to tell Harold Wilson he has cream on his lips. Yet she is overemphatic, pulling some strange faces. Her vowels are efficiently sliced – with every “e” hiked up to an “i” – but they scarcely change over 60 years.
The PMs have had a reshuffle. Tony Blair, a new entry, is delivered by Mark Dexter as a Cheshire cat grin. Dexter also plays Cameron, who sends the Queen to sleep, and then snaps her. His slippery suits and dimpling complacency are spot on, but where is the lethal plausibility that helped to get him re-elected? David Robb’s Eden stoops in a morning suit; Sylvestra Le Touzel’s Margaret Thatcher swoops on her vowels like a bird of prey. John Major is putty-coloured. No one has more than one trait apart from Harold Wilson, who in Nicholas Woodeson’s non-lookalike portrayal greys and wanes as his mental ability leaves him.
Stephen Daldry – a man who, if he has really given up on being mayor of London, should have a theatre of his own – directs with his customary panache. Bob Crowley’s design pays clever tribute to the theatre-within-theatre notion of the play: his receding doors look like a tunnel of small proscenium arches. The onstage costume changes (from spanking blue to hideously fierce red, from side-parted brunette to stiff grey perm) are a terrific sleight-of-hand. And in one instance more than that. Scott Thomas changes from young woman to monarch in a minute. She waits with her back to us – her audience – like a novitiate in her white slip. She turns, shrouded in the jewel-encrusted robe, face encased in the heavy pincushion crown. The moment captures the gaudy absurdity and the crushing weight of her position.
Entertaining all this, but unadventurous. It panders to easy anti-intellectualism, suggesting that the Queen’s “ordinariness” (what?) is a bulwark against damaged, over-achieving PMs. Better be dull than have an idea. It takes on received ideas of each PM. It cosies up to the Queen. The laughter is provokes is pleasant but easy: not the gurgle of revelation but the snigger of recognition.
• Until 25 July. Buy tickets from theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330 333 6906
