A Right Royal Farce

Synopsis

Set immediately after the Queen's death, A Right Royal Farce depicts an imaginary future in which Prince Harry makes a bid to be crowned King. Far from being the dim-witted party boy of popular imagination, Harry turns out to be a brilliant Machiavellian operator who enlists the support of his drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend in an elaborate plot to steal the throne.

Our Review:

1 August 2006

There are some shows, not many, that are dignified even by a bad review, and this embarrassing dud from Toby Young and Lloyd Evans – job-share drama critics on The Spectator and authors of last year’s equally appalling Who's the Daddy? – is one of them.

It’s not even that members of the royal family would be upset by the defamatory nature of their representation; they would more likely feel slighted that so feeble an attempt to reveal them “as they really are” is executed with such shallow contempt for the rules of farce.

Only the residual skill of Andrew C Wadsworth’s Prince Charles, humming “My Way” with a bag of organic vegetables on his head, and the talent of Sara Crowe – investing Camilla with a heavy gait, hee-haw snort and a wonderful trick of catching up with someone’s sentence before last while gazing blankly at their present one – wheedles any sort of star rating out of me at all.

The set up? The present Queen, “the ...

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Latest User Review

89.145.197.114) - 11 August 2006:

Not great but not as bad as the reviews suggested. Some of this is in poor taste and many of the jokes are cringingly obvious, as is some of the acting. That said, I quite liked Andrew Keith's knowingly laddish Prince Harry, really enjoyed Andrew C Wadsworth's loony, tree-hugging Prince Charles and William Hoyland's racist dirty-old-man Prince Philip, and completely loved Sara Crowe's outrageously horsey and randy Camilla. The moments when I laughed out loud were all to do with her. The 2nd act sags badly, but overall this is a merry if undistinguished night out, enlivened by the redoubtable Ms Crowe....

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