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.
Jeremy Paxman’s book-sized essay, On Royalty received great attention, not least because he was a republican writing on his new favourite topic. If he’s not a convert, he certainly writes with the zealousness of one. While perhaps not as successful as his previous book, The English, his book on royalty is compelling when exploring his own personal royal anecdotes: watching them up close at Sandringham, having his suits pressed by butlers, and knowing how many eggs are cooked to get one right for Prince Charles.
Paxman also investigates royalty as a concept, its history and cultural legacy, asking the question: What is the role of a monarch in today’s world, and how has it changed?
Stephen Frear’s recent film, The Queen also picks up on this theme. It cleverly juxtaposes royal life with political life, but at its heart is an exploration of the woman herself, the queen, and an attempt to speculate on what makes her tick. Who knows if the royals sit around watching TV, or if the Queen drops in on her neighbours alone in her 4WD, but it makes for a good story, and humanises them.
With the film’s events set around the death of Diana, we see royalty reduced to a simple family with an unusual role in public life. Private tragedy and the complexity of relationships and emotions unwind as the public demands a display of mourning. The Queen and Prime Minister Tony Blair struggle to understand one another following the death of Diana, and try to reach a compromise.
Frear’s film is a fiction, based on reality. A speculation. Helen Mirren is strong, and very convincing in her role, but there’s a strange feeling about this film – that the events are too recent and people still in power so it doesn’t want to feel like fiction, more a re-writing of history. Reviewers have criticised Frear for his use of “gross caricaturing”, with characters appearing like “refugees from a sitcom”, and have suggested that screenwriter Peter Morgan takes dramatic license too far in claiming that Blair saved the monarchy from demise. But perhaps caricature, drama and neat endings are what we want to see, they certainly reflect the larger than life reality we expect from such an unusual family.
It’s not the first time the Royal family has appeared on film. In 1969, Royal Family debuted, showing a documentary about life behind palace doors: private, public, and no doubt carefully choreographed, it depicted a year in the life of the Windsors. It was the first television film about the family life of the Royal Family, and shown on the eve of the Investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales. It’s interesting to imagine another being made today, and what a different story it might tell. Perhaps Frear’s film is the closest we will ever get, without one of them entering a celebrity reality show.
In The Queen, we see the royal family’s annoyance and surprise at Diana’s appeal, expressed by the public after her death, and you can’t help but think that the real living royals must be slightly annoyed that even in her absence Diana stole the show in this film too. While Frears has chosen the queen as his star, Diana’s presence looms large in the film. Some critics argue that her cultural legacy of “transforming royals into pop stars” can be seen as the template for The Queen, and also more obliquely for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in which Kirsten Dunst plays the 18th-century queen, seen through the lens of pop culture.
What’s nice about Frear’s film is that it shows the living royals in the context of our own times: history that we’ve lived though. Other films about royalty like Elizabeth and The Madness Of King George or The Last King of Scotland bring us figures from history we’ve only read about. As one reviewer comments, “Part of the People magazine-style guilty pleasure of The Queen, of course, is that it lets us peep behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle”. It gives us a “fictional portrait of still-sitting heads of state, with characters we know from the sides of coins chewing over private anxieties at breakfast and in boudoirs”.
Critics have commented on the deft use of drama and comedy, often within the same scene, in The Queen. The film’s mix of reportage, drama and politics is addictive to a nation constantly hungry for gossip and expose. We like to see royalty exposed: comically, tragically, as the boy or girl next door, but we also want them in all their might and glory. And the layers of celebrity in this film are thick. As one reviewer claims: “If today’s royals are simply part of celebrity culture, in turn some stars have taken on the aura of old-fashioned royalty”. Add the power of politics to this mix of celebrity and it has all the ingredients to satisfy us.
It’s nice to think that Frear’s version of the queen as a grandmother, albeit a distanced, old-fashioned monarch, might not be so far from the truth. Earlier this month she went out to the cinema herself, attending the London premiere of the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale. And, of course, it made the headlines, as well as the front page of her website.