At the age of 91, Prunella Scales has reprised one of her favourite roles. The actor, who was diagnosed with vascular dementia 10 years ago, has recorded the part of Queen Victoria for a production at the Edinburgh fringe this summer.
Scales played the character more than 400 times in An Evening With Queen Victoria, a play written for her by Katrina Hendrey in 1979. She returned to the show on and off in performances around the world until 2007.
The new production, retitled Queen, has been reworked by Julian Machin, who was a stage manager on the first production. He kept in touch with the Fawlty Towers actor and, thinking audiences would now appreciate it as an unofficial prequel to The Crown, suggested Scales could be involved in a revival.
“On stage, Prunella is the master of subtle activity,” he said. “The recording is very moving. I never doubted she could do it, but I didn’t realise she would do it quite as well as she has.”
He recorded her audio performance over two days in February 2023 and said Scales was physically well and keeping up a busy social life with husband Timothy West. Her instinct for performance was still intact. “She sees recording machinery and she just goes into it,” he said. “It just took her back into herself. It was quite astonishing.”
Scales’s relationship with the long-serving queen is extensive. She appeared as Victoria in the children’s television drama Station Jim (2001) and in the BBC drama-documentary Victoria: An Intimate History (2003). In 2014, she was part of an interactive project called Talking Statues Speak Their Minds for which she recorded a monologue to be played in front of the statue of Queen Victoria on London’s Blackfriars Bridge.
In the stage show, which is at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms in August, she plays the queen in her later years, her recorded words being interlaced into the action. The production also stars Sarah Crowe as Victoria in her middle years and Grace Darling as the younger queen.
Spoken entirely in Victoria’s words, taken from her diaries and letters, it presents a monarch’s eye view of the British empire during a 63-year reign that was eclipsed in length only by that of Queen Elizabeth II.
“Victoria has got so much in common with Elizabeth,” said Machin. “The play has come into its own. It’s like a prism through which you view the evolution of the monarchy. More or less everything that is done in the monarchy today is done because Victoria did it that way.”
Director Denise Silvey of Cahoots theatre company, who is also running the celebrity-packed programme at Edinburgh’s Prestonfield House, said her aim was to look behind the cliches of royalty: “We have to bring out the human side of it so people can relate to it more than the monarch saying, ‘We are not amused.’ One of the actors said what she loved was the humour and the modern ideas.”
Returning to the play 45 years after its debut, Machin said his estimation of Scales as an actor had only increased. “I found out how versatile Prunella is in looking at this play. I’ve seen it so many times and I was amazed by how I’d taken it for granted how good she is.”
Silvey agreed: “Her timing is impeccable and always was – that’s the art of a good actor.”
Queen is at Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 1–25 August.
