An Evening with Queen Victoria, a portrait in her own words. Devised and directed by Katrina Hendrey. Prunella Scales with Ian Partridge (Tenor) and Richard Burnett (Piano). The Playhouse, November 29-30.
This team has toured Queen Victoria four times to Australia as well as to North America, New Zealand and what the program refers to as the Far East. It's still a worthy study of a Queen from her own point of view but it is showing signs of wear.
Scales has a very long history as a popular actor, with credits of much more artistic value than her famous Sybil in Fawlty Towers, so it was disappointing to find her lines slipping occasionally and her intimacy with the audience quite variable. Perhaps the ravages of time are catching up, though physically she is remarkable for ably capturing Victoria aged 18 as well as aged 82 just before her death in 1901.
The 19th Century family soiree setting was easy on the eye, and appropriate, though Hendry's husband Richard seemed to me not as relaxed at the keyboard as I expected - a little rushed and having to cover some missing notes occasionally. However, I did appreciate the quality of tone and the atmosphere created by tenor Ian Partridge. His singing and gentle playing of just enough of the role of Prince Albert held the show together, I thought.
Though I too, in 1961, found Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam fascinating, as Victoria had 100 years earlier after Albert's unexpected sudden death, I wonder now if it is not time to let Victoria go. To hear her patronising attitudes, even if natural to a monarch, presented as empathetic humour seems rather out of our place and time. It's a worry that her great great great grandson Charles (just search the web for British Royal Family Tree) seems to have very similar ideas about the common people. In Victoria's words, after she assumed the title of Empress of India, "Prince and peasant are all the same ... before God".
Here on earth it's a different story, and Prunella Scales tells it well - though on this occasion not as well as I had expected.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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