The Audience

Finally we got to see the NT production of  The Audience
It was the cinematic re run in a small Art Deco refurbished cinema in Colwyn Bay...and I must admit, I loved the much lauded production featuring Dame Helen Mirren .
Once you get passed a slight left wing bias from playwright Peter Morgan, The Audience is a wry and witty "look" at the Queen's weekly "audiences" with a selection of her Prime Ministers over a 60 year period.
As you may expect from the writer of The Queen, Helen Mirren's monarch is a sympathetic, multilayered and gloriously difficult character, who is always a match for her PMs who all come to her with a host of circular and recurrent problems of self doubt, failure  and political shenanigans.

A wonderful Richard McCabe

The Ministers with the possible exception of a " Royal acting" Thatcher ( a wonderful Hayden Gwynne) are given an interesting and original  slant . Gordon Brown ( Nathaniel Parker) is vulnerable and obviously depressed. John Major ( Paul Ritter) tearful and out of his depth and Harold Wilson ( Richard McCabe) is more Huddersfield than "ecky thump" it is his Northern Straight talking chauvinistic character that gives the play its heart, as we find out in the last few moments that out of her leaders, it is his old fashioned chutzpah that the Queen favours most above all of the others.

I enjoyed the play. Mirren's Queen is just how most of us would like to envisage her. Dedicated, steely, naturally funny and able to kick ass when the need arises.

8/10