“The Audience”

I’ve had some peak experiences with seeing plays of which I’d previously known essentially nothing.

I am, for example, an enthusiastic admirer of the playwright Michael Frayn.  His farcical comedy Noises Off, which I first saw at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, is, when performed with energy and good timing, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.  And his remarkably different two-and-a-half-actor drama of ideas Copenhagen, which I saw in London, is perhaps the most surprising theatrical performance of my theater-going life.

Tonight, my wife and I went with two of our friends to a “Fathom” event at one of our local movie theaters, to see a recorded live performance (from London’s West End) of the wonderful actress Dame Helen Mirren (who also recently appeared in the excellent film Woman in Gold and who had previously played Elizabeth II in the superb 2006 film The Queen), along with a very good supporting cast, in a play by Peter Morgan called The Audience.  I pass by what I saw as its fairly obvious attempt to assimilate Sir Anthony Eden’s Suez Canal crisis to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and its quite negative portrayal of Margaret Thatcher; the play’s left-leaning politics were scarcely a surprise.  But it was a fine, fine evening of theater.  I don’t know whether there will be other such broadcasts of it.  Perhaps you’ll have to see it in London or in New York, where it’s now running on Broadway, or maybe it will eventually go on tour.  In any case, I recommend it heartily and enthusiastically.  Try to see it with Dame Helen, though.  She was, as she always is, remarkable.

In the excellent discussion between Helen Mirren and the play’s director, Stephen Daldry, that followed the closing scene, Dame Helen several times used the adjective “writerly” to describe The Audience.  I agree.  And that’s probably a commonality between it and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and one of the reasons I like them both.  They’re eminently and continually quotable.