Sex, drugs and a royal ruckus: the US play with a future gay Prince George

Prince George was a "dignified figure" at last week's Trooping the Colour ceremony, said The Telegraph. But across the Atlantic "a very different picture" of the future king is being painted in a controversial new off-Broadway hit with a "gasp-inducing" title: "Prince Faggot".

Canadian writer Jordan Tannahill's "highly speculative royal romp" is set in 2032. It imagines 18-year-old Oxford student Prince George, nicknamed "Tips" (John McCrea), bringing home his Indian boyfriend Dev (Mihir Kumar) to meet the Prince and Princess of Wales (K. Todd Freeman and Rachel Crowl).

The play envisions "the tabloid feeding frenzy" that erupts after George's relationship goes public, as well as internet comments such as: "Glad someone's adding some spice to that Yorkshire pudding."

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Audiences must lock their phones away during "graphic sex scenes" in which McCrea and Kumar are completely nude. The characters "experiment with poppers, acid and S&M fetish: this fictional Prince George appears in bondage and shares a kinky fantasy of being walked like a puppy".

'Thrilling' and 'inflammatory'

While the play is likely to "stir outrage" among royal insiders, who condemned "The Crown" for being "unfair" and "untrue," in New York it has earned "rave reviews", said The Times.

Indeed, while I "resist the dragooning of a preadolescent boy into a dramatic argument about sexuality and monarchy" and "cringe" at the use of the F-slur in its title, said The New York Times' chief theatre critic Jesse Green, the play is "thrilling". It is an "inflammatory, nose-thumbing, explicit" play that, despite beginning in "pain and provocation", ultimately "finds its way to splendour", said Green.

Americans 'still can't get enough' of royals

Yet the real George, who turns 12 in July, "will probably Google himself in the next few years and find out about this play", said Slant.

Its depiction of his "addictive behaviours, his privileged petulance, and his self-destructive self-absorption" offers "limited sympathy to the suffering of a fictional Prince George", while abdicating "any responsibility of sympathy or care toward the real one".

This play is also "the latest example of a peculiarly pervasive trend: Americans turning our royal family into an explicitly gay soap opera", said The Telegraph.

Following HBO's "The Prince" and Amazon's "Red, White & Royal Blue", these "navel-gazing" and "fluffy" depictions are hardly a "grave insult to the institution". Instead, they're "an odd compliment"; proof that Americans "still can't get enough of our royals, even if they have to view them through a fictionalised, flamboyantly queer modern lens to justify their enduring obsession".