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Tanika Gupta’s ‘The Empress’ is such a quintessentially RSC play that the venerable company has now staged it twice in ten years. A decade after Emma Rice’s inaugural production (which never made it to London), here’s a revival from Pooja Ghai that dials down the quirk in favour of a more contemplative, epic take on Gupta’s near three-hour play about Indian Victorians.
Mixing fact and fiction, the play’s biggest indulgence is to imagine that every single one of its lead characters caught the same boat to England in 1882 - that’s real-life figures Abdul Karim (Raj Bajaj) and Dadabhai Nairoji (Simon Rivers), plus Gupta’s fictional protagonist Rani Das (Tanya Katyal), and then for good measure a cheeky cameo from a young Gandhi (Anish Roy).
It’s an ensemble piece, but the 16-year-old Rani is the de facto lead, played with a winning mix of vulnerability, liveliness and twinkling charisma by the excellent Tanya Katyal. If the spirited teen is an invented character, then her circumstances sadly aren’t. Brought over as the ayah (or nanny) to a white English family returning from the subcontinent, her mistress abruptly jilts her at the docks, having lied about keeping her on in England purely to get childcare for the voyage – something that very much did happen.
You can see why Gupta made Rani up: there may not be a famous individual who led Rani’s life, but the things that happened to her, happened to real women – her journey through insalubrious daal-serving boarding houses and creepy Indiaphile masters is the show’s most satisfying and illuminating arc. And she’s much more than just a cipher or a victim of circumstances – she has a steely core that both protects her and gets her into trouble.
Indicative of Gupta’s cheerily maximalist approach to historical storytelling is the fact that the second-biggest role is Queen Victoria herself. As played by Alexandra Gilbreath, she’s no-nonsense bordering on irreverent, chafing at the stultifying levels of Royal formality and palace intrigue that hem her life in. She also has a complicated relationship with her Empire, which has vastly expanded under her rule, but not necessarily at her behest. Gupta doesn’t so much whitewash the old queen as use Victoria’s – at the time scandalously – close relationship with her servant and later tutor Karim to explore her complicated feelings for India, which she treasured but never visited. Victoria’s son Edward VII burned all correspondence between her and Karim, so the relationship is ripe for informed speculation, and Alexandra Gilbreath’s performance is fantastic, both for the iconoclastic spin on Victoria, but also the chilling moments where her liberal attitudes hit their limits and she presents a darker side.
The biggest problem with ‘The Empress’ is that there are a lot of big figures in it, but not all of them feel as fleshed out as Rani and Victoria. Bajaj’s Karim mostly just stands around looking pained – we get little sense of his inner life. Naoroji is just too enormous a historical figure to boil down to his (successful!) campaign to become Britain’s first Indian MP – there’s a lot of context lacking to his character that’s somewhat confusingly hinted at.
It also feels like Gupta doesn’t pull together a shared thesis about her characters - the play just abruptly ends at the conclusion of the Victoria/Karim storyline. I can’t help but feel Ghai’s production could have done more to tease out the idea of the various leads as kindred spirits. And a couple of satirical songs feel like a hangover from the very different original production.
Still, Ghai‘s decision to treat ‘The Empress’ like a straight historical drama is probably the right one – it’s a pacy, engrossing show, and if it might have worked even better as a six-part BBC drama, then that’s very much a recommendation.