John Osborne once wrote: “My objection to the royal symbol is that it is dead; it is the gold filling in a mouthful of decay.” Yet, as Nicholas Wright’s new play, The Last of the Duchess, makes clear, the corpse retains enough of glittering life to make it a good subject of drama. But despite the fact that a national treasure, Sheila Hancock, is starring in the play, is this a subject worth digging up again?
OK, the story is intrinsically interesting. We travel back in time to when the aged Wallis Simpson – widow of the abdicated King Edward VIII, who died in 1972 – lived as a recluse in a mansion in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris.
Then, in 1980, the Sunday Times planned to publish a profile of her by Lady Caroline Blackwood, an Anglo-Irish journalist.
But when Caroline arrives, she soon finds her access to the reclusive royal blocked by the octogenarian Maître Suzanne Blum (Hancock), the Duchess’ lawyer, friend and general bloody-minded control freak. In fact, Caroline soon finds herself more intrigued by the character of Blum, a much more interesting person than the sad and bed-ridden Duchess. In particular, she begins to ask questions about why Blum keeps the royal out of sight. Could she be dead?
Well, no, but Blum’s interest for Caroline comes from the fact that she is keeping a secret. What is her nature of her stranglehold over the octogenarian Duchess? Other secrets gather in the dark corners of the gloomy mansion. One of the few remaining friends, the loyal Lady Diana Mosley (Angela Thorne), talks about the old lady’s jewels, which keep cropping up for anonymous sale. But who is pocketing the money?
Based firmly on Caroline’s book, The Last of the Duchess, Wright’s account is marvellously light on
its feet, effortlessly conveying the story, conjuring up the eccentricities of life at the edge of celebrity. As an image of old age, decay and vanity, it is moving. And the themes of snobbery, secrecy and sex are refracted through the cracked champagne glass whose crystal throws suggestions of corruption and decay like eerie lights over the gloomy mansion.
The programme’s cover shows a photograph of the aged Duchess taken through a window: on the ledge outside, a pigeon stares inside. At times, the play has a similar distancing effect: we are that pigeon, outside gazing in. As we peck at scraps of gossip, we never really get to see the Duchess, but instead have to content ourselves with the eldritch hilarity of Lady Mosley, as deaf as a gilded doorpost, chatting with a sloshed Caroline.
Wright brilliantly suggests that we can never ever really get to know other people. Like everyone else, journalists create fictions out of messy reality, projecting their fantasies of people onto people themselves. So Blum’s airbrushed version of Wallis’ life is contrasted with Caroline’s much more scandalous account. In the struggle between the two, truth begins to recede and the mystery deepens.
One thing is for sure. This account of the royal family is a welcome antidote to the uncritical and well-known coverage of their relatives’ heroism in Second World War or the glamour of more recent wedding celebrations.
Wright’s play reminds us that Edward VIII and much of the aristocracy in the 1930s were crypto-fascists and soft on Hitler. Lady Mosley is a cheerful anti-Semite. Not very nice.
Directed with enormous sympathy by Richard Eyre, the acting does not disappoint. Hancock radiates authority and suggests a yearning for youth. Her voice rises and falls like the temperature of an invalid, sometimes coolly deep, sometimes rising to a shrill wail. As Caroline, Anna Chancellor is a portrait of a woman on the skids, her familiar contralto instantly recognisable. This is a witty, thought-provoking and rather elegant entertainment. Yes, it was well worth resurrecting those ghastly Windsors.
