Out of sorts at the RSC

The RSC’s summer blockbuster is about Queen Anne. It’s called Queen Anne. It opens at the Inns of Court where drunken wags are satirising the royals with a naughty sketch about boobs and beer guts. Everyone on stage pretended this was hilarious. A few audience members did too, out of politeness.

The principal characters arrive with their dramatic goals on display. Queen Anne wants to rule wisely. Her general, Marlborough, wants to conquer widely. His wife, Sarah, wants to help her monarch to rule wisely and her husband to conquer widely. And Sarah’s scheming cousin, Abigail, wants to befriend the Queen so that she can marry a steady salary. These characters are neither very admirable nor very wicked and their objectives don’t cohere into a single narrative. Nor do their stories conflict with each other very much and the result is a flaccid lump of half-kneaded dough. It’s like watching a week-long episode of Blackadder with all the jokes removed, bar two.