A deliciously frothy West End entertainment about the late Queen Mother’s conspiratorial relationship with her gay factotum Billy Tallon becomes something much stranger in the second half. Marcelo Dos Santos’s play is about two figures striving for relevance, and chafing against the social strictures they revere. Yet having brought them into sharp focus, he seems uncertain what to do with them.
Michael Grandage’s production features a delicately witty performance of floaty, unworldly privilege from Penelope Wilton – slightly off her words, not helped by having to wrangle a recalcitrant corgi at one point. As Billy, Luke Evans is a rogue with a ramrod back and Feargal Sharkey’s hair, a stickler for propriety when it suits him, a mischievous rule-breaker when it doesn’t.
We’re in the pink, damask silk-lined garden room at Clarence House in 1979. Billy, Page of the Back Stairs, lords it over junior servants, propositions a new footman, and fights off the attempts of a bean counter to curb the household’s boozy profligacy. He stage manages official tea parties, feeding vodka to teetotal guests, and gingers up the dowager queen’s dull hours with louche jokes, impressions of Princess Margaret and Prince Charles, and the occasional waltz.
A fact-finessing flashback shows Wilton’s Queen meeting 15-year-old Billy (Ilan Galkoff) after the funeral of George VI: as well as her husband she’s immediately lost her home and her relevance to her daughter, but remains trapped by duty. Billy reveres the glamour and propriety she still represents to him, and fashions himself into something indispensable (he thinks). Both hope to shut out the changing world, but it enters, in the shape of men Billy picks up on nocturnal walks.
One of these, Ian (Eloka Ivo) is a black artist who, through a wildly improbable sequence of events, is passed off as a Prince of Lesotho at a tea party that plays like Joe Orton crossed with one of the more racist 70s British sitcoms. A black phallus Ian sculpted finds its way with grim inevitability into the Queen Mother’s hand, just as Ian starts ranting about the Southall riots.
Farce slides into absurdity as the QM withdraws her favour from Billy and brings him almost literally to heel in an act of corgi-inspired humiliation. Dos Santos’s obvious message is that the Windsor Firm may indulge underlings but will ruthlessly cut them out if they transgress too far.
Except that doesn’t actually happen in this imaginary confection, and it didn’t happen in real life. An awkward epilogue tells us that Billy worked for the Queen Mother for another 23 years until her death and was given a royal sendoff in the Queen’s chapel (ho ho) of St James’s Palace when he died five years later (though he also lost his home, at Clarence House, as soon as she was gone). Grandage’s production is consistently funny, and the performances entertain, but this play really doesn’t know what it’s saying.
Duke of York's Theatre, to 27 Jan; buy tickets here
