It was June, the month that commemorated and celebrated LGBT Pride...weeks, no, days before the landmark US Supreme Court decision that legalized same sex marriage all over the great United States. Up and down 42nd street were plays that proudly explored the sensibilities, promise, even humor of this gender preference...immortalizing this mindset and inspiring so many others.
Amid the din, one little play stood out, the surprise show of the season, in the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on West 45th Street. It was The Audience, a new play by Peter Morgan, starring the legendary Helen Mirren, and ably supported by an excellent Anglo Saxon cast led by Dylan Baker, Geoffrey Beevers, and Michael Elwyn, to name a few, with just one other lady actor Judith Ivey as Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher.
Not being a critic, I dare not attempt to review the play. I did what any starstruck member of the audience would do...I read the playbill, listened to the dialogue and remembered it as best I could, then afterwards researched the history. What follows is what I have found and experienced that overcast afternoon in the theatre.
Peter Morgan's humor-rich play is about how Britain's Queen Elizabeth II has from the start of her investiture and coronation as monarch, met with each of England's Prime Ministers( from Sir Winston Churchill to David Cameron) for an hour, once a week, over the decades, to discuss matters of state, share opinions, consult on matters of import and consequence to the seat and heart of the Commonwealth. Helen Mirren scintillates as Queen Elizabeth, a role she has played on the big screen, through the years, through many ages...from her first years as a child playing in the hallowed halls of Buckingham Palace while her father, King George, reigned...to being a young queen not so many years after her debut, mourning the untimely passing of her beloved father, the quintessential, famous Bertie...to being a married monarch torn at times between her devotion to the family and commitment to duty...to being the enduring, steady if sometimes steely, but secretly mirthful monarch not without a sense of humor even as she seems to have been born with a sense of true destiny.
Peter Morgan is also not new to this setting, having written the screenplay of the movie The Queen in which Miss Mirren also starred and captured the world's imagination. It is said that Peter Morgan found an outlet to express the fun, if sometimes wickedly funny, moments that he imagines the Queen must have had in all these decades of rule. Admittedly, the vignettes and dialogues are fictional, enriched only by the spot on characterizations of the cast from the Queen's secretary to the Prime Ministers.
The unnerving thing about The Audience is that it is not presented in chronological order...challenging both the audience' mastery of English and world history, and Helen Mirren's heart wrenching portrayal of the many faces and ages of Queen Elizabeth II of the House of Windsor. In one scene, she is girlish; in another, she is motherly almost; in yet another, she is majestic, as she should be. She also shows both strength and vulnerability, courage and compassion, occasionally revealing her Achilles' heel(a possible dearth of political wisdom and savvy), and then surprising with a keen if intuitive insight.
Given the many and quick costume changes, the wide gamut of ages she portrays the Queen in, it is small wonder Mirren won the Tony award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, Comedy. Mirren was so heartbreakingly believable, Judith Ivey, the only other adult female actor in the play, paled pathetically.
Mirren was not the first actress to play Queen Elizabeth in The Audience. The play first opened in London a couple of years ago with British thespian Kristin Scott Thomas in the leading role.
I caught The Audience in its last week in New York... and felt like I had won the lottery for having the opportunity to find tickets and catch it!
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