The Audience review: Helen Mirren leads a Mike Yarwood show with Oscar-level talent

Peter Morgan has extracted more cash from the royal ‘brand’ than the Buckingham Palace giftshop. He’s at it again with The Audience, a fictional dramatisation of the weekly conversations between the Queen and her first ministers. This is a smart idea carried off with intelligence and plenty of style. Morgan dispenses with a linear parade of PMs and leaps to and fro across the decades. A youthful Harold Wilson bustles in full of self-confidence and jokes. The Queen takes to him immediately. Barely ten years later, the Yorkshireman has dwindled into a broken figure and his legendary memory is fading fast. But as he shrinks, the bond of affection between himself and the monarch grows. It’s one of the play’s few attempts at emotional depth.

Elsewhere, Morgan prefers to lay on crowd-pleasing gags, at the cost of authenticity. It’s hard to believe that Her Majesty would tittle-tattle about the Blairs arriving at Balmoral in ‘spanking new tweeds’, with the price tags still attached.