One-off performance to take place in London two days after Timothy West’s memorial service
Queen, a play written in Queen Victoria’s own words taken from her letters and journals, will get a special performance next month in London.
Queen will be performed at Kings Place in London on Sunday 28 September at 2pm.
The play stars Olivier Award-winner Deborah Findlay as Queen Victoria, virtuosic pianist Michael Dussek and the voice of legendary stage and screen star Prunella Scales.
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.
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.
Bringing Queen Victoria’s innermost thoughts back to life, the play was a worldwide success on radio and film, and has now been adapted and re-titled Queen by writer Julian Machin.
This production is directed by Denise Silvey, and 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, 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.
“I’m very happy, it really is rather extraordinary,” Timothy West said when he finally heard the recording, before his death.
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.”
Timothy’s Memorial at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, will take place 2 days prior to the Kings Place performance.
Queen is presented by Chronicles of Ikaro in Association with Cahoots Theatre Company, and is playing at Kings Place in London on Sunday 28 September at 2pm.
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