She was the Queen Mother, he was the page who came to service at the age of 15 and worked with her for half a century until her dying day. But if it sounds like a drama akin to Queen Victoria’s cross-class friendship with John Brown, this new play starring Penelope Wilton and Luke Evans is not quite as deep or meaningful as that.
Set in 1979, just before Margaret Thatcher’s election victory, Marcelo Dos Santos’s script draws soft, safe comedy from rumours that while William “Billy” Tallon worked for “ma’am”, he brought back rent boys. The Queen Mother is a widow, no longer at the coalface of royal duties, now at Clarence House where she is barely visited by the rest of the Firm. Billy is “page of the backstairs” and enjoying life as a queer man, inviting a pick-up, Ian (Eloka Ivo, slowly but satisfyingly socialist), to his royal digs.
