Originally opened 27Dec 1906 as The Hicks Theatre. Formerly The Globe, renamed in 1994 in part in tribute to Sam Wanamaker, so that his dream of a new Shakespeare Globe would be the only Globe in London. 983 seats. Society of London Theatre member. In 1999 Delfont Mackintosh Theatres Limited acquired the freehold of the Queen s and the Gielgud Theatres from Christ s Hospital, Horsham. The lease of the Gielgud Theatre will revert back from Really Useful Theatres to Delfont Mackintosh Theatres in March 2006 after which there are plans to refurbish both venues and to build a 500-seat theatre, The Sondheim, above the Queen s. This will be the first new theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue since 1931.
For sixty years Elizabeth II has met each of her twelve Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace - a meeting like no other in British public life - it is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said. Not even to their spouses. The Audience breaks this contract of silence - and imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen.
From Churchill to Cameron, each Prime Minister has used these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional - sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive. In turn, the Queen can't help but reveal her own self as she advises, consoles and, on occasion, teases. From young mother to grandmother these private audiences chart the arc of the second Elizabethan Age. Politicians come and go through the revolving door of electoral politics, while she remains constant, waiting to welcome her next Prime Minister.
Don't miss booking your tickets to see Mirren as Queen once more.
Stephen Daldry's production of The Audience starring Helen Mirren premiered at the Gielgud Theatre last night (5 March 2013, previews from 15 February).
Peter Morgan's play sees Mirren reprise the role of Queen Elizabeth II, for which she won an Oscar in Morgan-scripted 2006 film The Queen, and reveals a series of pivotal meetings between various Downing Street incumbents and their Queen.
…The surprise element in Peter Morgan's highly entertaining new play… is its imaginative range, lack of sentimentality and incisive intelligence. And in Helen Mirren's brilliant but un-showy performance - magically still and dignified, with a glancing look of either regret or critical intervention despatched along her own left shoulder and arm… In Stephen Daldry's extraordinarily clever production of The Audience… The chronology is fluid, dream-like in Buckingham Palace itself, designed by Bob Crowley as a marble-pillared hall of receding perspectives where Mirren, in a series of brilliant costume-changes, and superbly differentiated wigs, braces herself for revealing encounters… But the most striking structural device is that of pairing Mirren with her younger self... It's a beautifully poised theatrical element in an evening that never slips into a series of sketches, and in Mirren's performance goes way beyond that...
…The Audience is more than just a reprise: the character seems newly and richly inhabited. The play reunites Mirren with The Queen’s writer Peter Morgan. It is also a welcome return for director Stephen Daldry. The results are elegant and sometimes very funny. Mirren is onstage almost all the time, thanks in part to some startlingly quick costume changes, and delivers a performance of skill and subtlety… The chronology is jumpy, so as to avoid the sense of a stately procession. But for all the good looks and neatness of Daldry’s staging (complete with waddling corgis), it’s hard not to feel that the play could be more dynamic. It resembles a set of sketches, albeit with strong thematic links. Still, they add up to an absorbing whole. And Mirren is superb: there are playful touches, a restrained sensitivity, and above all an air of dignified solitude.
What a great if faintly guilty pleasure this play proves… Very wisely Morgan avoids a chronological plod… What’s remarkable is that Mirren is unobtrusively changed on stage into different costumes and wigs to suggest different periods of her reign and is almost eerily persuasive whatever age she is playing… The Audience is often wonderfully funny, with the Queen proving a deft mistress of the verbal barb, but also genuinely moving… Star billing after Mirren must go to Richard McCabe for his wonderful Wilson... Paul Ritter is equally affecting as John Major… Stephen Daldry directs a pitch-perfect production, with a truly palatial design by Bob Crowley. And yes, there are real Corgis on stage, too.
...Helen Mirren, who once again gives a faultless performance that transcends mere impersonation... As a dramatist, however, Morgan faces two problems. One is that no one ever knows what is said at these weekly tête-à-têtes since they are un-minuted. The other, more serious, is that in a constitutional monarchy, the Queen has no authority to contradict policy… However hard Morgan tries, the evening can't help but seem like a series of revue sketches: a kind of "1956 And All That". What holds it together is Stephen Daldry's adroit production and Helen Mirren's luminous performance... Mirren also captures the Queen's mix of the extraordinary and the ordinary… if Morgan's speculative and essentially static high-class political gossip – what you might call Pepys behind the scenes – acquires emotional resonance, it is largely thanks to the naturally majestic Mirren.
…The resulting vignettes are of variable quality but they add up to considerably more here than the sum of their parts. This is thanks to the thematically piercing idea of presenting the encounters non-chronologically – a format which is expressed with a haunting, magical malleability by Stephen Daldry's superlative (and beautifully designed) production. And the 67 year old Mirren rises to the daunting technical challenge… Watching Mirren convey, with astonishing skill, the Queen's fluctuating freight of experience (she's hardly offstage and some of the costume/wig changes are done in plain view) brings this home with all the might of metaphor… there are aspects that you know have palpable designs on you that are so well-handled that you willingly acquiesce. Richard McCabe is superb as Harold Wilson… Mirren's tartly humorous and profoundly human portrayal… is magnificent. She makes The Audience a right-royal great night out.
Libby Purves The Times ★★★★★
…funny and truthful, good-hearted, spiky, full of surprises. I loved every minute… The parade of prime ministers is not chronological but thematic… Morgan’s imaginations are anchored in history: there are stunning political moments, sometimes oblique... It’s all fiction, of course, and often painfully funny… Mirren is well at ease with her royal persona, spanning the decades with discreet lighting, wig-changes and costumes... Stephen Daldry directs with filmic economy… Even the briefest scenes have lovely touches… From time to time the child Elizabeth wanders by, plummily 1940s in nightdress or Brownie uniform. She is sombrely warned by her older self: “No one will ever call you by your name. Or look you in the eye.” No, there is nothing cheap or inhumane in Morgan’s mosaic of the personal, political and poignant. And yes, there are corgis. Two.
"What fine hands the country is in!" exclaims the Queen, sarcastically, after John Major has confessed he only passed three O-Levels and she, of course, "home educated" but treated as a girl not worth educating, can claim none at all.
The surprise element in Peter Morgan's highly entertaining new play, speculating on what conversations Her Majesty might have had in the weekly Tuesday afternoon private meeting with her Prime Ministers (although Tony Blair changed it to Wednesdays), is its imaginative range, lack of sentimentality and incisive intelligence.
And in Helen Mirren's brilliant but un-showy performance - magically still and dignified, with a glancing look of either regret or critical intervention despatched along her own left shoulder and arm - we see an almost Shakespearean monarch who measures her own loneliness and sense of duty against the temporal troubles of her premier politicians, some of whom are even keener to tell her how to do her job than they are to explain their own.
In the Stephen Frears film The Queen (2006), Mirren and Morgan combined to analyse the aftermath of the Princess Diana tragedy in terms of judging the public mood and re-assessing the role of the monarchy.
In Stephen Daldry's extraordinarily clever production of The Audience, there's a more beguiling attempt to invest the Queen with a depth of humanity and sensitivity she no doubt has but rarely betrays: a postage stamp with a pulse, or an isolated figurehead?
Alec Douglas-Home ("friend of the family"), the much-disliked Edward Heath and the bumptious Tony Blair (hated by Prince Philip, apparently) all register non-appearances here, but the rest of her "Dirty Dozen" PM's turn up, from Edward Fox's doddery but iron-fisted Churchill to Nathaniel Parker's blustery, nail-chewing Gordon Brown, Michael Elwyn's pill-popping Anthony Eden sleep-walking "illegally" to disaster in Suez (here posited as the Iraq of its day) and Haydn Gwynne's oddly elasticated, steam-rolling Mrs Thatcher, incensed about an alleged "political" leak from the Palace.
Paul Ritter (John Major) & Helen Mirren (The Queen)
The chronology is fluid, dream-like in Buckingham Palace itself, designed by Bob Crowley as a marble-pillared hall of receding perspectives where Mirren, in a series of brilliant costume-changes, and superbly differentiated wigs, braces herself for revealing encounters with the two men she obviously liked most, Paul Ritter's bendy-limbed, fidgety and confessional John Major, and Richard McCabe's "Hunched of Huddersfield" Harold Wilson.
Major opens out about his unhappy schooldays and lack of appetite for the job, while Mirren's Queen moves gradually towards the appealing cleverness and straightforwardness of Wilson, moved by his illness at the end. Their scene together in a spectacularly mist-laden Balmoral (Rick Fisher's lighting is a marvel throughout) is a classic, complete with tartan blankets, wailing pipers and frisky corgis.
But the most striking structural device is that of pairing Mirren with her younger self (Nell Williams on opening night) as both a voice of conscience and a receptacle of the older Queen's wisdom and advice.
It's a beautifully poised theatrical element in an evening that never slips into a series of sketches, and in Mirren's performance goes way beyond that, even when David Peart's unctuous Jim Callaghan and Rufus Wright's puppyish David Cameron (sending her off to sleep) move her perilously close to direct expressions of contempt.
