"The Madness of King George III" by Alan Bennett

I saw the Madness of King George III by Alan Bennett at the Grove Theatre on Saturday 15th April; it was directed by Orion Powell.

It was enjoyable but somehow it never quite worked. The suspension of disbelief never quite happened. They were actors on a stage reciting lines throughout.

Why?

King George III suffered from some sort of breakdown which prevented him from effectively ruling three times during his reign. The first attack was in 1788. In those days the King appointed the prime minister and was essential to the business of government. If the King was incapacitated, the Prince of Wales would take over as Regent and the government would change. But, given the power of the King, how could the Crown Prince take over? Did Parliament have the power to choose who was King? This illness therefore precipitated a constitutional crisis. 

To a large extent, this is a play of ideas. Bennett is trying to explain to an audience presumably not well versed in the complexities of Georgian politics that the government run by Prime Minister Pitt the Younger is dependent on the continuing health of the King, in particular on his ability to confirm appointments and so ‘bribe’ MPs and those who control parliamentary seats. When madness rendered the King incapable of doing this, the opposition demanded that the Crown Prince became Regent; there was every likelihood that if this happened the King would never recover (or at least be deemed to recover) because the Prince Regent would not want to cede power back to his dad.

So it's about power and this story is mirrored by the story of who controls the King. At the start of the play no-one can sit in his presence, or talk directly to him, or look at him, but once he has become the patient he is blistered, strait-jacketed and gagged without his permission.

These are complicated ideas and I doubt I would have understood them without having read the playscript beforehand (and the author's introduction). 

And the fact that the play is about ideas makes it harder for the actors to develop characters and therefore harder for them to emotionally connect with the audience.

Bennett makes this more difficult. Because he wants to show the King before, during and after his illness, he has to extend the timescale. I would have started in media res, with the King already ill, with the new-fangled treatment by outsider Dr Willis battling with the old-fashioned remedies of the establishment quacks, with Pitt and Fox at loggerheads over whether there should or shouldn't be a regency, with the Prince of Wales arguing with his mother as to what is the best thing for his father.

I would also have drastically cut the cast. In the Bennett version the King has five attendants (three pages and two ensigns). I would have had two (you need two in a play so they can conflict with one another, otherwise it is a lot of should-I-shouldn't-I soliloquies). There are three members of the government and three members of the opposition; again, only two are needed (in fact, if the Prince of Wales counts as the opposition, you'd only need one other, especially if the Lord Chancellor who flipflops can be counted in both camps). There are three establishment quack doctors, only one is needed (although this might have lost the humour of the preposterous quackery). The Duke of York was no more than sidekick and foil to the Prince of Wales.

What good would this have done? It would have meant that the audience would have needed to spend less time wondering who was who and more time getting involved with each character. It would have meant that each actor would have had more lines and therefore more time to develop the characterisation of the role. 

As it was, this play was mostly actors delivering lines.

Of course, this would be a tremendous simplification of a complex history ... but Bennett's play has already done this. 

It might be argued that this is a historical drama so Bennett has to stick with the historicity. Except he didn't. One of the pages of the King is called Fortnum and there are a couple of lines, designed to elicit laughs, about Fortnum leaving the palace to start a grocery business in Piccadilly. But the real Fortnum left the court of Queen Anne in 1707, 71 years and three monarchs before the action of this play. His grandson was an attendant of George III's Queen but his service started in 1761, still 27 years before this play started. So Bennett is being ahistorical here. Like Shakespeare was with his histories. Drama don't need to stick to the truth.

Who am I to think that I can rewrite a play that is perennially popular? But why is it popular. Is it because Alan Bennett already has a name for writing great theatre? Or is it because it is about royalty and the typical British theatre audience loves royalty (and the typical British actor loves all that dressing up). 

I don't think this is a well-written play and I think that my feelings about the performance at the Grove exposed the play's flaws.

The script contains extensive stage directions, prescribing how scenes are to be changed and even the music to be played. Most of these were ignored by the Grove company, who otherwise followed the script to the letter.

Selected quotes:

• "He is not himself. So how can they restore him to his proper self, not knowing what that self is?" 
• "Our saviour went about healing the sick." "Yes, but he had not £700 a year for it, eh?"
• "I am the King of England." "No, sir. You are the patient."
• "I have always been myself even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. That's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem." 
• "Did we ever forget ourselves utterly, because if we did forget ourselves I would like to remember." 
• "No life is without regrets. Yet none is without consolations."

I think Bennett was trying to distil a very complicated story into too short a space of time. The need for a large cast meant that characters could not afford to be complex. Contrast this with one of his Talking Heads monologues in which a single character is given fifteen minutes. I suppose there must be a place for dramas with a large cast and a lot of action but I prefer one with a fiercer focus.

April 2023

This review was written by the author of

Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God