Images: 
Total Rating: 
***3/4
Previews: 
February 14, 2015
Opened: 
March 8, 2015
Ended: 
June 28, 2015
Country: 
USA
State: 
New York
City: 
New York
Theater Type: 
Broadway
Theater: 
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater
Theater Address: 
236 West 45th Street
Website: 
theaudiencebroadway.com
Running Time: 
2 hrs, 15 min
Genre: 
Drama
Author: 
Peter Morgan
Director: 
Stephen Daldry
Review: 

All Hail the Queen! Helen Mirren rules as Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in Peter Morgan's The Audience at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. While Morgan's screenplay for the award-winning film, “The Queen,” focused on the time of Princess Diana's death, his play presents a non-linear sequence of eight prime ministers, each in a fictionalized, 20-minute weekly meeting with the monarch at Buckingham Palace.

For more than 60 years, Elizabeth II has met with her prime ministers to hear their briefings, their complaints, their frustrations. No records were kept, but Morgan's book, with direction by Stephen Daldry, portray the Prime Ministers's different personalities as well as the Queen's growth and sensitivity through the years. It is historic and it is engaging with insightful moments of humor, pathos and awe.

At the top of the play, the Queen meets with Prime Minister John Major (Dylan Baker). At 69, she is a confident, experienced and formal, and an also somewhat cozy sovereign. While Major is tense, almost whining, about the state of the country, Elizabeth lightly tries to put him at ease.

A seamless move into the second sequence, after an onstage magical costume and wig change, presents Elizabeth as a lithe, 25-year old Princess. Mirren physically looks and acts young, her body language and speech lilting and leaner. Waiting for her coronation, she is having her first PM meeting with an aged Winston Churchill (Dakin Matthews). She knows her purpose and is determined to learn what she must before wearing the crown. However, there are still lessons to be learned from Churchill who instructs, "...The Sovereign listens, makes notes, maybe on the rare occasion asks a question, and unconditionally supports (the prime minister)....The Sovereign always agrees." He adds, in times of struggle, "Just never show that struggle, Lilly-Bett. It's not what your subjects want from you."

Agreeing was not always easy. Elizabeth II, who turns 89 this April, is interpreted by Mirren with layered inflections, a cool demeanor with surprising bursts of humor, testiness and sly teasing. She reflects warmth as well as inner turmoil even when supporting legal decisions when she might prefer a different direction. Through the parade of years and their challenges, she exudes public confidence, her posture rigid, her facial expressions rarely showing the struggle within.

Delving under the surface of her formal stance, Elizabeth turns to her 11-year-old alter-ego, alternatively played by Sadie Sink and Elizabeth Teeter, remembering her youthful desires. Her other sanctuary is Balmoral Castle in Scotland where the Queen can let her hair down, so to speak, and relish roaming the countryside with her Corgis.

A very human moment shows the Queen nodding off during David Cameron's (Rufus Wright who also plays Tony Blair) long-winded discourse. She develops a close camaraderie with the Labor Party's Harold Wilson, played with humor and pathos by Richard McCabe. Their mutual admiration and ease is evident over the years when he visits the Queen at Balmoral. He impresses her with his photographic memory and poignantly years later, she is deeply dismayed when he admits his diagnosis of early Alzheimer's.

Judith Ivey as Margaret Thatcher is a disappointment, huffing and puffing like a loudmouth. The introductions by Geoffrey Beevers as The Queen’s Equerry, are amusing in their fastidious detail and lead engagingly to the following sequence.

Bob Crowley's splendid set displays the formal showmanship of the audience room in Buckingham Palace and later the Queen's get-away, the comfy spaciousness of Balmoral Castle with its space heater from Woolworth's. Director Daldry mines the pageantry, outstanding when he directs Crowley's spectacular coronation costume change right before us, music building, changing from a plain suit (always with a diamond pin but still simple) to layers of lush, ornate fabric until she is dazzlingly bejeweled and costumed with the heavy crown held over her head. A majestic ending to Act I, and throughout, The Audience offers a captivating look at the humanity behind palace doors.

Cast: 
Helen Mirren, Dylan Baker (John Major), Geoffrey Beevers (The Queen’s Equerry), Michael Elwyn (Sir Anthony Eden), Judith Ivey (Margaret Thatcher), Dakin Matthews (Winston Churchill), Richard McCabe (Harold Wilson), Rod McLachlan (Gordon Brown), Rufus Wright (David Cameron), Sadie Sink/Elizabeth Teeter (11-year old Elizabeth).
Technical: 
Set and Costumes: Bob Crowley; Lighting: Rick Fisher; Sound: Paul Arditti; Production Stage Manager: Roy Harris; Music: Paul Englishby
Critic: 
Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed: 
March 2015