QUEEN Will Play a Special Performance at King's Place
The performance is on Sunday 28 September at 2pm.
Queen - a play written entirely in Queen Victoria's own words, taken from her letters and journals and bringing her innermost thoughts back to life - will be performed at King's Place in London on Sunday 28 September at 2pm.
Starring Olivier Award-winner Deborah Findlay as Queen Victoria, virtuosic pianist Michael Dussek and the voice of legendary stage and screen star Prunella Scales, Queen is a revival of Katrina Hendrey's acclaimed one-woman show An Evening With Queen Victoria which Prunella performed for 28 years, starting at The Old Vic in 1980. The play was a world-wide success, on radio and on film. Now adapted and re-titled Queen by writer Julian Machin, this production, directed by Denise Silvey, incorporates a specially recorded 2023 voiceover of Prunella Scales as the elderly monarch whose recorded words are interlaced into the action.
The concert pianist Michael Dussek, who played the final dates of the US and UK tours and who recorded the music in the shortened version of this revival in 2024 for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and for London's Tabard Studio Theatre, will provide live piano accompaniment, performing music (chosen by the fortepianist Richard Burnett, 1932-2022) which Queen Victoria would have known and loved.
Covering her 60-year reign, Queen reveals Victoria's private grief and dealings with wily politicians whilst displaying a wonderful sense of humour. It reveals what it's like to be in a position so totally unlike anyone else's and exposes her true nature, as having wide human sympathies and a fervent capacity to love.
This performance is dedicated to Timothy West, Prunella Scales's late husband, who died last year and without whose caring enthusiasm and encouragement this adaptation involving Prunella would not exist. “I'm very happy, it really is rather extraordinary,” he said when he heard the recording, finally. Timothy's Memorial at St James's Church, Piccadilly, will take place 2 days prior to the Kings Place performance.
Julian Machin said: “The odd thing was that it didn't occur to me, in spite of her well known vascular dementia, that Pru couldn't do this recording, even aged 92. I just never expected that she'd do it quite so well and so movingly.”
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