‘The Audience’ Review: Jeremy Gerard On The Brilliant Return Of Helen Mirren’s Queen
Sometimes I think we Americans worship the Royal Family as much as our British cousins do. Or maybe, as I say in my video review above, we Yanks just love watching the unsurpassable Helen Mirren play a royal.
Mirren won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen back in 2006 (she has had three other Oscar nominations in her lustrous career). Now Dame Helen is playing the Queen again on Broadway in The Audience (which, like The Queen, was written by Peter Morgan, who also wrote Rush and Frost/Nixon).
Mirren also played the first Queen Liz in a 2005 TV miniseries, Elizabeth I. She even was the voice of the Snow Queen in the 1995 animated film of the same name. She has this queen thing down quite nicely, and shows it again as this play, for which she won an Olivier Award in its London debut makes its brief limited stopover in New York.
The title refers to Liz’s weekly off-the-record meetings with her Prime Ministers, beginning with Winston Churchill and coming right up to David Cameron, eight in all. They’re a disparate, sometimes unruly lot, each of whom she handles with wit and aplomb, not unlike how she handles a couple of adorable, yelping Welsh corgis, in Stephen Daldry’s perfectly pitched production, gorgeously designed by his frequent collaborator Bob Crowley.
Watch my review. Are you planning to see the show? Let us know what you think.
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