There’s no doubt that royalty makes for great entertainment. They sell millions of newspapers and magazines, and their rather extraordinary lives are the fodder for pages of speculation. Films, plays and novels have always stolen the grand and not so grand stories of royalty. From Shakespeare, to the modern celebrity gossip mag, we want to know what they do, who they do it with, and how they behave. Like animals in a zoo, we want to know if they’re “normal”.
A couple of plays about royalty, including A Right Royal Farce and the stage adaptation of Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, have proved we are hungry for royalty in all its forms. In fact, there has been something of a plague of royalty in the arts of late.