Writer: Toby France
Directors: The Pesky Players
“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,” says Tandazani Sigauke’s Elizabeth I, “but I have the heart and stomach of a total slag.”
That’s about the size of this saucily comedic look at one of the great rumours of the Elizabethan age and beyond – that the so-called “Virgin Queen” was anything but, and that she had an illegitimate son who was named Henry, after her father.
Toby France’s hour-long tale is not rooted in any of the academic rigour with which some historians have pursued such stories. Instead, it’s a much sillier endeavour, one in which Henry (France), after having fallen in love with the theatre, survives a casting couch audition at one of William Shakespeare’s orgies to become an actor at the Globe. There, he falls in love with fellow actor Jonty (John Posnett), who is playing Tight-arse Andronicus – but his scheming mother has plans to marry him off to secure the Tudor line.
As Jonty’s character name may suggest, The Fruity Prince is not aiming for subtle humour here. Sometimes it hardly seems to be aiming for comedy at all: lines about a pigeon pie being “too pigeon-y”, or the Queen describing someone as an “ugly bitch”, are delivered as punchlines that carry zero finesse.
In other areas, the play fares better with its humour; for example, with a Tudor adaptation of Madonna’s Vogue, or when the empty stage is transformed into a royal garden with the addition of a hilariously tiny lawn. But there are other occasions when a line that would be moderately funny once is repeated several times, diminishing on every return. On one occasion, the Queen berates the “researchers” for playing in the music a wedding march that wasn’t written until the 19th century and is thus an anachronism. For a play which just minutes previously has shown Henry a picture of Pamela Anderson in her Baywatch era as part of a conversion therapy scene, it’s a poorly delivered joke that doesn’t fit in with the play’s aesthetic.
A saving grace is Katie Driver, whose sex-obsessed Shakespeare adopts the persona of a Cockney gangster and enlivens every scene they are in. Driver’s later persona of Gertrude, Liz’s intended bride for her gay son, is completely different but can also easily dominate the stage.
The writing and direction could both be tightened up and France’s final monologue to the audience in character tails off rather than giving the play the firm conclusion it needs. Like Andronicus, The Fruity Prince needs to be tighter.
Continues until 9 December 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Tudor Sauce
