Right Royal Triumphs

The Royal Family is invariably treated sympathetically and affectionately on stage, whatever the political hue of the playwright

- Michael Billington

IT may come as a relief that no one has revived it in time for the current celebrations, but there is actually a play in existence about a royal wedding. Prompted by the marriage in 1960 of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, it’s called The Blood of the Bambergs and was written in 1962 by John Osborne.

It lifts its plot from The Prisoner of Zenda and is based on the idea that, in a moment of crisis, an Australian photographer takes the place of the groom, for whom he is a dead ringer. Hardly one of Osborne’s best works, it’s a bilious attack on British royalty-worship and the only surprise is that it got staged at all.

At the time, all scripts, under an act instituted by Sir Robert Walpole in 1737, had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval. The act was only repealed in September 1968, which will prompt discussion on its 50th anniversary this year.

One of the many powers granted to the Lord Chamberlain was to protect monarchs and living politicians from theatrical impersonation; it was only the common-sense intervention of George Vl that enabled plays about Queen Victoria to escape the censor’s blue pencil. If Osborne’s work got through the net, it was because the Lord Chamberlain’s reader grasped the potential absurdity of banning a ‘horrid play’ based on a once-popular novel.

What is striking now is the needless anxiety about portraying the Royal Family on stage. Far from being savagely satirised, they invariably emerge sympathetically. One reason, I suspect, is the recurrent fascination with the gulf between the ceremonial public figure and the private person.