Whilst she may have had the body of a 'weak and feeble' woman, it is hard not to believe that Elizabeth I didn't also possess the heart and stomach of a playwright. So eloquent were the words spoken and written in her lifetime that they still carry significant power and agency today. And the spell that she wove upon her subjects four and a half centuries ago has not abated with time.
A quality hour
As the daughter of an uxoricidal man baby and a 'goggle-eyed whore' executed for treason; and as the inferior sibling to a hard-faced evangelical brother and an even harder-faced pyromaniacal sister... Elizabeth's relationship with her family was, at best, complicated.
And yet, with a little luck and a lot of guile, Elizabeth rose from her difficult beginnings to become one of the most loved, revered and mythologised monarchs of all time. The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, Good Queen Bess.
In this piece, Tammy Meneghini assumes the stage with an imposing Elizabeth: replete with a superb costume which really deserves its own programme credit. She pouts. She intones. She raises her leaded eyebrows in apparent surprise at her own formidability. It is a compelling performance, and one which leaves us in no doubt that this lady could absolutely have reigned - and expedited the awful decisions to facilitate that reign - for nearly half a century.
Knitting together Elizabeth's own words - and aided and abetted by a Mr W. Shakespeare for added poetry - Carole Levine's script bounces along through the major moments of Elizabeth's life, name checking all the usual suspects. It is clear that the entire team are more than a little in love with Elizabeth themselves; and this tenderness is tangible in both her reminiscences of Robert Dudley and the necessity of the murderous documents she had little choice but to sign. The human Elizabeth behind the (white) mask is very much on show here, and director Lynn Nicholls resists any temptation to maintain an all-guns-blazing characterisation: instead showing us the realities and responsibilities behind the pomp and grandeur of regency.
This is a quality hour of research, detail and reverence made manifest: and one for history lovers of all ages.
