Ensemble Theatre, September 10
6/10
The last five minutes pin your ears back, leaving you wondering why more of the play didn’t bristle with this intensity; this sense of lives being defined or wasted. Perhaps the curious detachment we feel for most of the 90 minutes may be attributed to mixed intentions on playwright Melanie Tait’s part, veering from satire to weightier emotions.
Based on true events, The Queen’s Nanny, here having its world premiere, tells of Marion Crawford, whom Elizabeth (Duchess of York, later the late Queen Mother) appointed as nanny of her young daughters Elizabeth (later the queen) and Margaret, a position “Crawfie” (as she was affectionately known) held for 17 years from 1933.
Tait specifies her play be performed by just three actors, and in Priscilla Jackman’s spare production, Elizabeth Blackmore is Crawfie, Emma Palmer is Elizabeth, and Matthew Backer plays everyone else, including a narrator, the king, a butler, Crawfie’s eventual husband and, most prominently, Princess Elizabeth, or Lilibet.
Much of the play is an elaborate satire, albeit an affectionate rather than merciless one. Nonetheless, satires innately keep us at arm’s length, laughing at the characters rather than with them. The key exception is Crawfie herself, who sacrifices her child-bearing years to the care of the princesses, and then becomes estranged from the future queen whom she raised as her own.
This is partly because Crawfie became the first in a long line of royal servants to publish a tell-all memoir, The Little Princesses, which, of course, infuriated the snooty Queen Mother. She feared the whole monarchy might come crashing down as a result – the specific danger being that people would find out how mundane they were.
The structural problem is that by the time Crawfie, the only character capable of winning our hearts, has done so, the play is ending. This is no fault of Blackmore’s performance. With her erect carriage, demureness and lilting Scottish accent, she gives us a warmly credible Crawfie from the outset, conveying self-effacing intelligence and the expert child-rearing she bestowed upon her charges (who saw little of their parents). More than that, Blackmore wordlessly expresses Crawfie’s inner world of reveries via such a dreamy expression in her eyes as transports her and us far from the confines of the stage.
Emma Palmer is a hoot as Lilibet’s overbearing, over-drinking mother, but the role is inherently caricatured. Regardless of what history may tell us, the play would be much more compelling if we could feel some sympathy for her abhorrence of Crawfie’s book as a gross betrayal. Instead, we tend to laugh.
Backer is wondrously chameleonic as he flits (with barely a costume change) between his half-dozen characters, his body metamorphosing with each new voice, most notably the initially angelic Lilibet, whom he depicts across 55 years of her life. But the flitting is mostly between surfaces, as Tait gives Backer little of psychological depth.
Jackman directs the production with technical assurance, having hit upon a delightful scenic vocabulary with designer Michael Hankin that involves minimal, slightly surreal furniture and the use of dolls’ houses and even a model train.
Much more than merely accomplished, Tait’s storytelling can be invigorating in its propulsive use of narration and its bursts of lyricism, but the play remains a light comedy, when something deeper was beckoning. The jangling confluence of bitterness, disloyalty and disappointment that mires us at the end could have entrapped us across more the work – although those who find the royals innately fascinating may well be more consistently engaged.
Until October 12.