The King’s Speech at the Watermill Theatre – review

The King’s Speech playwright David Seidler, who also penned the screenplay for its hugely successful 2010 film adaptation, sadly died as this revival was in the production phase at the Watermill. Its triumphant return to the stage is a fitting tribute to him.

Thanks to a superb cast of just seven – three of whom play more than one meaty role – and sensitive, vigorous direction from Emma Butler, the production does full justice to Seidler’s intriguing and convincing retelling of the British Royal Family’s fortunes in the mid-20th century, especially in the lead up to World War Two.

His play’s title has a clever double meaning. Younger son of George V, the future George VI, known as Bertie to distinguish him from his father, has a speech impediment – a stammer that makes the prospect of public speaking a terrifying one. On a stage with a microphone as its focal point, it’s hardly surprising that his terror is palpable to the audience.

Peter Sandys-Clarke plays Bertie with extraordinary empathy and insight, desperation and tension evident in every fibre of his otherwise elegant and aristocratic body. It’s no wonder he desperately seizes on the hope offered by Aussie speech therapist Lionel Logue.

As the play opens in the years leading up to World War Two, it is no secret that he is likely to become King, given his older brother Edward’s scandalous relationship, then marriage to twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson, and indeed the couple would soon be seen in public cosying up to Hitler on a tour of Nazi Germany six months before their marriage.

Stephen Rahman-Hughes makes a stoical but chilly David, as Edward was known in the family. In a remarkable doubling, Rosa Hesmondhalgh plays both Wallis Simpson and Myrtle, the loving, supportive wife of successful therapist Logue, trying to overcome her yearning to return home to Australia.

Bertie’s salvation too is his extraordinarily encouraging wife Elizabeth. Amira Challenger brings warmth and patience to the role of the woman perhaps today remembered best as the much-loved late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

In many ways though, the central couple here are Logue, played with persuasive vigour by Arthur Hughes, and Sandys Clarke’s Bertie, trying to believe in and follow Logue’s therapy. Logue’s secret weakness is his failure to pass auditions to become an actor on the newly burgeoning medium of radio, a clever gloss on his character.

The cast is completed by a trio of elder statesmen, who appear above, apparently at a gentlemen’s club. Winston Churchill (Jim Kitson, also playing George V) and Stanley Baldwin (Rahman-Hughes again) clearly relish the opportunity to comment, often with comical derision, on what they see as the farce developing below. The third member of this triumvirate is Christopher Naylor’s wonderfully scornful Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, who offers the Royals what he considers to be God-given advice, with less than loving kindness.

All this is played out on a set of mysterious, interlocking panels of wood. Designer Bretta Gerecke describes her work as a “metaphoric journey through the pathways of Bertie’s mind”. Her “twists and turns” certainly work for me.

Apparently, the Queen Mother asked that the stage version wait to debut until after her death. I do wonder though, whether she might not have relished it after all, especially if she saw the delight and rapturous applause with which the audience received the production.