[title]
Before ‘were you silent… or were you silenced?’ and before ‘I'd taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking’, there was: ‘there were three of us in this marriage’.
Princess Diana and the BBC’s Martin Bashir, 27 million viewers, a seizmic TV interview whose foundations were discredited in 2021 when it emerged that Bashir forged bank statements to secure it, leading to a vow from the BBC never to air it again.
And because we haven’t had enough Diana content on stage, Jonathan Maitland, journalist turned journalist-who-writes-plays, kicks up the silt once again with this staged essay, which retells the background to the interview.
Maitland is clearly drawn to controversial figures, having tackled Jimmy Saville and Boris Johnson in previous plays. Here the focus is the obviously less villainous People’s Princess, though he conjures a baddie in the form of Tibu Fortes’s deceitful Bashir. The best thing about it is Yolanda Kettle’s demure Diana, head cocked, voice breathy, a slippery combination of vulnerability and steeliness.
Maitland wisely opts not to restage much of the interview itself, though we get its most famous lines. Instead he aims for a kind of chess match between Bashir and Diana, a back-and-forth of shifting power – who’s really courting who – without quite achieving it. Occasionally Matthew Flynn’s uncanny Paul Burrell tells us things.
Maitland falls too often into the trap of simply putting his research on stage. ‘The Interview’ is dramatically pretty dead, with just a few interesting facts here and there to keep us engaged.
And because director Michael Fentiman presents it all very simply with just the actors in the round on a rectangle of carpet, the play itself becomes sanctified and very exposed. The scrutiny is too much: the dialogue is shown to be limp and faltering, the structure odd, the theatricality tacked on.
The second half is even more irritating because Maitland actually raises some good points – who are we, who is William, to say Diana didn’t know what she was doing or saying – but does it by resorting to huge amounts of exposition. Bashir is grilled by BBC management, but these aren’t characters anymore, they’re sides of an argument. As well as Diana and Bashir, we get the third person in the relationship: Maitland, moralising.
In the unending swill of Diana content, from Pablo Larrain’s idiosyncratic biopic ‘Spencer’ at one end of the spectrum and Daily Express stories about her ghost at the other, ‘The Interview’ sits somewhere in the middle. It takes its subject seriously and tries to move beyond the black-and-white media takes. But in trying to make a good point it often forgets to be a good play.