Here he comes. Royalty’s favourite crackpot is back. Alan Bennett’s trusty drama, The Madness of George III, doesn’t really have a plot, just a pathology. The king is fine, he then goes barmy, he stays barmy for a bit, he gets bashed about by sadistic healers, then he recovers. It’s less a play and more a monologue amplified by a cast of glove puppets.
Each supporting character is given, at most, two attributes. William Pitt drinks and keeps his counsel. The queen snorts and whinnies like a German weightlifter. Pious equerries proclaim their loyalty. Various doctors wheedle and pontificate. The Prince of Wales, an overdressed slob, waddles in and out sounding greedy. The aristocratic Lady Pembroke trundles around like a wax cleavage in a noose of pearls. And Charles James Fox, one of the most flamboyant figures in English history, is reduced to a posh simpleton with a beer gut. And he wears a beard too, which, in the 1780s, would make him a pirate or a convict. Toffs didn’t sport whiskers until after Crimea.
The sets in Christopher Luscombe’s stylishly vacuous production are made from gilded picture frames nailed on to mobile flats. Gastropubs use the same motif to suggest forgettable elegance. Every single costume is as pristine as a freshly unwrapped bandage. Gowns, uniforms, frocks and tunics are all spotlessly neat, and ironed flat, as if the show has been hired from a museum and is due back tomorrow, at noon, in mint condition. It feels very remote, unlived in and not quite human.
David Haig, born with the gift of eternal middle-age, is well cast as the innocuous nitwit charged with the job of running an empire without losing any of the important bits (like America).
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