Peter Frost : On stage in Cape Town
The love between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson has inspired many a romantic fancy on stage, none slushier than the recent West End musical Always, a sunset-and-syrup escapade – as nauseating as it was, according to British playwright Snoo Wilson, untrue. Wilson’s new drama HRH, by contrast, could have been penned by a socialist Old Labour collective intent on heaping yet more humiliation on the royal house of Windsor.
The play, set in the Bahamas during World War II, exposes David Windsor as a Nazi sympathiser, a fool, sex-mad and apparently above the law. Simpson is worse – self- serving, sexually rampant, a Lady Macbeth in Chanel drag, a scheming Cruella de Ville intent on keeping her Dalmatian coat.
The drama plays out in a lounge in Government House, Nassau. Edward has been sent there from Paris by “The Firm”, to be out of the way of the war. Unofficially it was to stop his embarrassing carousing with Hitler, whom he clearly had a fondness and admiration for, even honeymooning at the man’s expense. Simpson is frustrated in exile, away from her salons and entitlements, and their relationship suffers, offering us a decidedly unsavoury glimpse into their world.
Edward has moved all his money into a Nazi bank, and the man who helped him do so is about to be fingered as the culprit in a gruesome murder on the island. Edward, with the help of the brighter Simpson, frames another man to protect the murderer and imports a sycophantic cop from nearby Miami to bungle the case.
That much of this is factually correct is astounding and great fare for drama. That Wilson manages to cock it up is equally astounding. Instead of the gripping ensemble piece it should have been, HRH is a two-hander, too long, a radio play, turgid at best.
Ralph Lawson (Edward) and Elzabe Zietsman (Simpson) must sustain the pace for two hours, and if Amanda Donohoe and Corin Redgrave couldn’t manage in London directed by Simon Callow – well, truth be told, fat chance here.
Script aside, the performances are curate’s eggs too. Lawson is sometimes strong but is wont to push Edward into caricature, overplaying the dim Peter Pan thing, denying the monarch the shading even this nitwit deserved.
Zietsman is handicapped the moment she opens her mouth, slugging her way through a trans-Atlantic accent from hell which entirely diminishes her wonderful physical presence, not to mention some very decent acting.
Set and spectacle are finely achieved, aside from a very bizarre stuffed dog, and direction is accomplished enough, given the obvious constraints of one room, two actors, two hours.
Ultimately HRH is a curiosity piece, an interesting lesson in history manipulation which is scuppered by its own zealousness and in need of a 30-minute trim.
A curious choice too for the Theatre on the Bay and the Alhambra. The no-holds-barred, dirty-laundry element will most likely piss off both theatres’ decent English backbone, and the republican crowd is not likely to seek their entertainment at these spots. Producer Peter Toerien does however have to be credited for trying something anti- establishment, even if it is not essentially the best choice.
— HRH is on at the Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town until May 2 and runs at the Alhambra Theatre in Johannesburg from May 6 until June 6