Backstairs Billy review, Duke of York's Theatre, London

Penelope Wilton as the Queen Mother in Backstairs Billy

Penelope Wilton as the Queen Mother: 'Rolls-Royce' casting

(Image credit: Johan Persson)

published 16 November 2023

"Backstairs Billy" is "the best new play about the royals" since Peter Morgan's smash-hit "The Audience", said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Packed with witty lines, it imagines the relationship between the late Queen Mother and William "Billy" Tallon, the flamboyant Clarence House steward (an "elevated Coventry commoner") who was her trusted right-hand man for many decades.

Marcelo Dos Santos's comedy has shades of both Noël Coward and Joe Orton, said Dominic Maxwell in The Sunday Times. He weaves together farcical shenanigans (in one sequence, Billy passes off a pick-up from the night before as a visiting African prince) with "nimble dialogue, a keen sense of absurdity and traces of tenderness too". The two leads – Penelope Wilton as the Queen Mother and Luke Evans as Billy – are superb. And it's very funny – it made me "laugh more than any other play this year".

Still, it is a very odd affair, said Sarah Crompton on What's on Stage. The play has all the trappings of a West End hit: "zinging one-liners"; a sumptuous set; "Rolls-Royce" casting. But "for the life of me, I couldn't work out why I was watching it or what it was really about". In other hands, it might have developed into either a "sensitive and amusing study of the bonds that can grow between servant and mistress", or an exploration of why people love the fallible royals. Instead, it "ricochets off into a messy mixture of farce, politics and class critique" while veering wildly in tone.

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Having brought his characters nicely into focus, Dos Santos seems to have been "uncertain what to do with them", agreed Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard. The play's "worshipful approach" to the Queen Mother doesn't help, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. The arrival of corgis onstage raises "ahhhhs" and it "all slips down easily", but there's no "emotional underpinning". At one point, the Queen Mother explains that "she likes TV comedy where people do accents and walk into things". This "anodyne" drama would surely have been right up her street.

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