Reviews

Maurice’s Jubilee

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10 August 2012

As Her Majesty the Queen has lately turned to playing herself in British film and entertainment (“Good evening, Mr Bond”), Nichola McAuliffe has had to get in quick with a royal impersonation before the job opportunity is withdrawn altogether.

Not only that, she’s written the royal play herself, and the funniest queenly lines since Alan Bennett‘s for Prunella Scales in A Question of Attribution. Prompted by those surprise jubilee descents on suburbia, she places her doughty monarch — a sedate vision in shocking turquoise with hooded eyes and bursting vowels – in a retirement bungalow in Penge, home of an 89 year-old jeweller.

Maurice and Helena — a lovely pairing of oak-like Julian Glover and flitting little jenny wren, Sheila Reid — had shares with Bradford & Bingley and savings in Northern Rock, which explains why they’ve downsized from Barnes.

And there’s been another woman in their 66 years of marriage: a young princess on the eve of her coronation whom Maurice visited in Buckingham Palace in his role as caretaker to the crown jewels; she promised to find him again should she achieve sixty years on the throne.

She’s only just in time, for Maurice is fading fast and has just hired a live-in carer, Katy from Tufnell Park, to share the burden with Helena. Director Hannah Eidinow sets up the reunion with a delicious sleight of hand, allowing Glover a twenty-minute speech which freezes the action in a memorial glow of touching reminiscence.

There’s an added piquancy with Maurice and Helena’s son stranded on the other side of the world on dad’s birthday (“Can I call you back; I’ve got someone with me”), and the final few moments are both deeply moving and surprising. The mostly elderly audience were on their feet, and not just because they needed a corporate dash to the loo after a bewitching ninety minutes.