A Dangerous Woman

Synopsis

Comedy about the Duchess of Windsor, set in Paris in 1972. The extraordinary events of her life come back to haunt her on the eve of her return to England behind her husband's coffin. Their relationship, as American socialite Wallis Simpson and Edward Prince of Wales later King Edward VIII had shocked the world and rocked the monarchy in the 1930s. Her attempts to reverse the Abdication of 1936 were to influence the events that led up to the Second World War. This is a play with a powerful mix of comedy and pathos. The behind-the-headlines, story of one of the 20th century's most enduring icons is revealed in which we follow the Duchess's career from Baltimore to Buckingham Palace and Berchtesgarten, the country retreat where she meets Hitler and plots to restore Edward to his throne.

Our Review:

12 March 2003

Paul Webb's new play is a fantasy based on the life of the woman who was at various times, Mrs Wallis Simpson and the Duchess of Windsor. The fantasy is, that instead of the empty-headed, vain, frivolous snob she was widely thought to be, Wallis Simpson was a sort of one-woman Bilderberg Group, manipulating many of the major historical events of the 20th century.

So, we encounter her murdering King George V, spying for Hitler, bedding Franco and Richard Nixon, ordering the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy, and, most heinously of all, being responsible for the political rise of Margaret Thatcher. Strangely, while inventing several myths about her, A Dangerous Woman doesn't dwell on her other affairs, particularly that with James Donohue.

From her Paris home in the death of her husband's death, Wallis Simpson tells her own story, musing on the wasted years and revealing that, far from being the greatest romance of the age, her husband's abdic...

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