Writer: Abigail Thorn
Director: Natasha Rickman
Queer counterparts to Bill and Ted find themselves trapped in a not-so excellent multiverse of Shakespearean madness in Abigail Thorn’s wacky new play, The Prince. Thorn has had a fantastically successful few years with her charity work for the Samaritans, television performances in the likes of Ladhood, her Philosophy Tube web-show and numerous successful stage plays. She is a brave and important writer, whose introduction to the published script of The Prince pulls no punches in describing the appalling and escalating transphobia of contemporary Britain at the same time as recognising with painful honesty the limited potential of drama to bring change.
Nevertheless, The Prince very much addresses that urgent need to bring wider understanding of trans experiences (it is bleak but understandable that to this end Thorn wanted to omit reference to the play’s themes from publicity), to humanise queerness and perhaps help other people come out as she herself did last year. It is a warm atmosphere in the auditorium with an audience swift to pick up on jokes about pronouns and transitions and very evidently enjoying the superb comic performance given by Mary Malone as initially clueless but warm-hearted ‘baby tran’ Jen from Framlingham. She has found herself transported into an eternal damnation of endlessly performing Shakespeare roles. The sci-fi concepts of interdimensional travel and manipulating reality with an artefact are familiar enough to be easily accepted, although as a device they could be less prominent in the script and something more original than slo-mo would have been welcomed at these moments.
Sadly the play’s central premise of performing Shakespeare roles (Thorn herself acts as a closeted trans woman locked into embodying the hyper-masculine Hotspur) as a metaphor for being trapped in gender identities dictated by society is fairly facile, the performative nature of life now such a well-established idea as to need more complex treatment. ‘Are you coming?’ Jen asks Hotspur when standing at the portal back to our universe. ‘Where?’ ‘Out!’. It is none too subtle. Perhaps Thorn’s slightly over-mannered performances as Hotspur and Hamlet are designed to show her character’s discomfort in her prescribed sexual identities, but the script does not really give her adequate opportunity to explore with depth her growing realisation that she is a trans woman – there are glimmers such as in a clever use of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy – but ultimately the sci-fi device demands a lightning-fast coming out.
In her programme notes Thorn tries to eject the elephant from the room by acknowledging the influence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and The Prince gives a welcome redress to the comedy generated through Alfred in Stoppard’s play. However, the wit seen in Thorn’s description of her play as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Deadnamed is seldom found on-stage. There are some excellent jokes about Titus Andronicus and Andrew Lloyd Webber, but all too often the humour depends on the incongruity of blunt modern slang as a response to elaborate archaic language. It can amuse but becomes repetitive, especially in its dependency on expletives, and it has been done before in everything from Bill and Ted to Doctor Who. The script would do greater justice to its important themes by reaching for the sort of wit Stoppard excels at.
This is a production with a great deal going for it: a simple but aesthetically pleasing set, striking fluorescent-effect tubes for lighting, an excellent comic turn from Corey Montague-Sholay and great work on the pseudo-Shakespearean verse from Ché Walker. However, it feels like the script needs a further rewrite to realise its full potential.
Runs until 8 October 2022
