King Charles III, Mike Bartlett’s play set in a future shortly after the Queen’s death, aired on the BBC this week. Its trim new television version was directed by Rupert Goold and starred, in what turned out to be his masterful swansong, the late Tim Pigott-Smith, who died suddenly between filming and broadcast. The drama, the stage premiere of which was at the Almeida in London before runs in the West End and on Broadway, is about a constitutional crisis precipitated by the new king’s refusal to sign a bill into law. As the country descends into riots and unrest, a subplot also emerges about a romance between Prince Harry and an ordinary London student (their idyll rudely interrupted by press intrusion). And the Duchess of Cambridge reveals a steely interior life quite different from the benign exterior projected by the real Kate Middleton.
Mr Bartlett’s blank-verse drama is a riff on the Shakespearean history play: he has given us a Prince Charles tinged with Lear and Richard III; a Duchess of Cambridge perfumed with Lady Macbeth; and a Prince Harry very obviously drawing on his namesake, Prince Hal of Henry IV, who hangs around taverns with his raffish pals only to abandon them brutally when duty calls. The royal family are, as Alan Bennett has pointed out (and he should know, given his play A Question of Attribution and story The Uncommon Reader, both of which feature the Queen) a gift to write about. They are endlessly seen while essentially unknown, and so provide blank slates on to which one can project imaginary life.
Mr Bennett has also written of fiction’s peculiar way of prefiguring the future – “write it, and it happens”. Since its premiere in 2014, King Charles III has come to look rather prescient. The year after it was first staged came the revelations of the “black spider memos”, lobbying letters from the Prince of Wales to various government ministers. And last year, Prince Harry issued an unprecedented statement condemning what he called the “wave of abuse” breaking in the tabloid press and on social media over his girlfriend, the actor Meghan Markle.
The broadcast of King Charles III came a few days after the news that the Duke of Edinburgh had decided to step down from official duties. A frisson of anxiety had gripped social media in the hours that had elapsed between the notification that an announcement was imminent and public circulation of its actual contents – a tiny foretaste, it seems clear, of the real shock that will attend the passings of the senior members of the royal family. It was, perhaps, such anxieties about the future that made King Charles III something of a hot potato in the press, with rave reviews in some quarters – and in others, somewhat laughable accusations that it was virtually treasonous.
Even staunch republicans can allow themselves to admit that in a time of great political uncertainty, the death of the Queen, when it eventually comes, is almost certain to provide a further jolt to an already shaken country. Only 1% of today’s population were adults when she was crowned; 83% of us have spent our whole lives with her as Queen. King Charles III, like all the best drama, touched a raw nerve. And it provides a gentle reminder that when the moment of succession does arrive, it will behove everyone – citizens, politicians, royals – to go carefully.
