Theatre in Review: The Audience (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)

	Rufus Wright, Helen Mirren. Photo: Joan Marcus

It's fascinating to contemplate how many great actresses have enjoyed career highlights playing the queens of England. Helen Hayes made a signature role out of Victoria. Bette Davis, Glenda Jackson, and Cate Blanchett offered distinctly varying takes on Elizabeth I, each of them compelling in its own way. And then there's Helen Mirren, first netting an Oscar for The Queen and now preparing to annex Broadway for the British Crown as Elizabeth II in The Audience.

Of them all, surely Mirren's task has been the hardest. We view Elizabeth I from the distance of half a millennium, allowing playwrights and screenwriters tremendous license; furthermore, Elizabeth's reign as the first -- and, at the time, only -- female British monarch is the very stuff of drama, even melodrama. If she hadn't existed, Shakespeare would surely have invented her. Victoria exists in the modern mind as a symbol of an era, her mannerisms and way of speaking well-known even today, and her life was marked by the profoundly disruptive event of widowhood in midlife. If her time on the throne wasn't as turbulent as that of Elizabeth I, she is still something of a gift to writers. But Elizabeth II is still alive, her true self forever hidden behind a façade of public decorum. Even as scandal rocked the House of Windsor in recent decades, she has remained distant, unapproachable, a sphinx without a riddle.

It is Peter Morgan's shrewd insight, first in his screenplay The Queen and now in The Audience, that this is what makes Elizabeth II the most fascinating of the three. In a modern world, saturated with oversharing politicians and celebrities, of reality television and tell-all memoirs, she sometimes seems to be the one person left on the planet whose thoughts remain forever out of public reach. Not that Morgan wants to pierce the veil surrounding Elizabeth in a vulgar way. But, as one of her ministers in The Audience says, not a little peevishly, "All of your PMs would agree you have a way of saying nothing yet making your view perfectly clear."

The title of The Audience refers to Elizabeth's weekly meeting with her prime minister of the moment, who fills her in on affairs of state. How like Morgan to focus on the most private events of this most private woman's life -- whatever happens in them remains forever locked behind closed doors. And yet their very unknowability must have been freeing to a playwright whose stock in trade is a certain kind of historical speculation. The Audience is barely a play at all, merely a collection of scenes showing Elizabeth fencing verbally with most of her prime ministers -- for some reason, neither Ted Heath nor James Callaghan makes the cut -- over a variety of issues. But Morgan's ability to make sparkling high comedy out of these encounters should not be doubted.

Indeed, Morgan writes the kind of exchanges on which good actors feast. A self-pitying John Major, bemoaning his inability to wrangle the members of the Conservative Party, says, "Beware the Invisible Man! When I walk into a room, heads fail to turn." "How lovely," murmurs the woman for whom the opposite is forever true. Responding to an unthinkingly insensitive remark by Gordon Brown ("God knows, if anyone has pulled off an inexplicable survival against the odds, it's you"), her reply is unexpectedly tart: "I think that started life as a compliment, but ended up somewhere else." When Major reveals the embarrassing fact that he was something of a washout at school examinations, she replies, "Well, I passed no examinations at all. What fine hands this country is in."

Morgan uses each scene to reveal Elizabeth at different life stages as we come to see how a lifetime of public service has shaped her into the unique personage she has become. She forces an aging, condescending Winston Churchill to admit that he has delayed her coronation, ostensibly to accommodate the event's lengthy preparations, to avoid calling an election. She reacts with fury to Major's suggestion that she downsize the royalty by paying taxes and decommissioning her beloved Britannia, the royal yacht (decisions she ultimately agreed to). She worms out of a reluctant Anthony Eden the admission that the United Kingdom and France have colluded with Israel to launch a strike on Egypt, thus precipitating the Suez Crisis. In a masterstroke, Morgan puts the same words in the mouths of Eden and, later, Tony Blair, when he justifies joining the US in attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq ("That we rehabilitate a country ravaged by a maniacal tyrant and reinstate a cooperative, friendly, pro-Western government that will safeguard our economic interests."). This is only one of many moments that plausibly suggest the Queen has seen it all, several times over.

Rufus Wright captures all of Blair's mannerisms, including the eerily omnipresent smile and the constant head adjustments that leave the impression he is looking for the right television camera, but he is only one member of a superb cast. Dylan Baker's Major is a mild-mannered functionary, unwillingly elevated to prominence and buffeted by political storms. Michael Elwyn's Eden is distinctly shifty underneath the aristocratic polish. Judith Ivey's Margaret Thatcher is an etched-in-acid portrait of a ruthless striver, the only prime minister who attempts to bully the Queen. (Oddly, Ivey employs a North Country accent, ignoring Thatcher's studiously posh vowels; both she and Baker, the most prominent Americans in the cast, struggle to sound authentic.) Dakin Matthews' Churchill is a lion in the late, late winter, his physical infirmities getting the better of him. Rod McLachlan's Gordon Brown is a joyless blowhard, still obsessed with his political frenemy Blair even after succeeding him. Wright does double-duty as David Cameron, who is all too aware that he is only the latest in a long line of Elizabeth's ministers -- and, as she curtly informs him, certainly not the last.

Providing The Audience with a kind of through line is Elizabeth's relationship with Harold Wilson, her first Labor prime minister, brilliantly played by Richard McCabe. It begins on a rocky note, with Wilson distinctively uncomfortable with royal privilege and protocol, yet unable to stop himself from asking the Queen to pose for a couple of Polaroid photos. Later, they grow more comfortable with each other; during a visit to her summer retreat, he teases her about her German forbears -- a sensitive spot with the Windsors -- referring to Balmoral as "a Rheinland schloss."One of the play's most touching scenes occurs when Wilson reappears, worn down by worry and overwork, his photographic memory vanished thanks to early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

But let there be no doubt that the supreme ruler of The Audience is Mirren, with her unending ability to signal the emotions hidden behind the royal composure. Faced with Major's tears, she turns away, crawling with discomfort at a display of spontaneous emotion. She lightly suggests that she is a bit obsessive-compulsive, liking all her shoes and pens in a row "like soldiers;" she adds that when they are not, "I get vexed," investing a single line with a sudden, shocking stab of real feeling. Tussling with Churchill over her desire to take her husband's last name, she reveals a world of worry over the state of her marriage. Stunned by Thatcher's impertinence and refusal to listen to her suggestion that she accede to sanctions against South Africa's apartheid regime, Elizabeth slyly questions Thatcher about her son, getting her to reluctantly admit that he does business with, yes, South Africa. Ivey gives Thatcher a smile that reveals her professional admiration for the skill with which the knife has been put in.

Stephen Daldry's direction allows The Audience to unfold with ceremonial assurance as it shifts back and forth in time, with Geoffrey Beevers' Royal Equerry providing the continuity. Daldry's fine hand can be seen in the way Elizabeth deftly deflects the return of a used handkerchief; the way she lets a pained question hang in the air, confident that she must have a response; in one minister's boisterous, protocol-shattering entrance and in another, broken minister's quiet withdrawal from the room and, probably, from a life in politics. In The Audience, even the tiniest transaction reveals a world of meaning.

Most of The Audience takes place in Bob Crowley's stunning rendition of the Audience Chamber, backed by a forced-perspective hallway that ends in a tiny Throne Room. When the action shifts to Balmoral, Crowley provides a splendidly detailed drop depicting the Scottish Highlands. The production also features a number of startling vista costume changes for Elizabeth, also designed by Crowley; not only does he capture her distinctive way of dressing, his clothing reshapes her silhouette as she ages. The work of hair and makeup designer Ivana Primorac is crucial to realizing Elizabeth at various stages of her life. Rick Fisher's lighting evokes the faintly haunted atmosphere of Buckingham Palace; he also provides seamless transitions into Elizabeth's private moments with her younger self. Paul Arditti's sound design provides solid reinforcement for Paul Englishby's underscoring, as well as such effects as rain, applause, and cheering crowds. He provides subtle reverb work on scenes featuring the young Elizabeth and her nanny, Bobo MacDonald.

The Audience climaxes in a coup de théâtre featuring Elizabeth joined by prime ministers past and present, revealing in a single stroke the remarkable ringside view of history that she has experienced. Early on, Churchill counsels her, saying, "One by one, your prime ministers will fall under your spell. In here. In this audience. In this room. Then they will be yours to guide and steer. Perhaps even influence." Even if The Audience is nothing more than fictional guesswork, Morgan makes sure that these words are never in doubt. -- David Barbour