Justin Butcher rose to minor fame in 2003 with his trilogy of Iraq War comedies ‘The Madness of George Dubya’, ‘A Weapons Inspector Calls’ and ‘Guantanamo Baywatch’. Timeless they weren't, but they were impassioned and chimed with the zeitgeist. The same cannot be said of Butcher’s dire latest project.
Notionally a send-up of the recent royal wedding, ‘The Prisoner of Windsor’ flounders, partly through dearth of wit, partly because it has all the ire of a damp flannel. Penned in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, the play seems fatally informed by the British public’s generally tolerant view of Wills and Kate. There is no republican edge here, or even a point to make, just a nice but dim William and bog-standard parodies of the older royals.
Essentially a series of sketches weakly pastiching the likes of ‘The King’s Speech’, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ and ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’, it coagulates into a desultory story about an enlightened Romanian gardener trading places with a reluctant Wills. It resembles nothing so much as the horrific oeuvre of lowest common denominator US filmmakers the Wayans brothers, and there are some moments of such excruciatingly tedious pointlessness that I genuinely wanted to cry.
On the plus side: there are maybe two good lines, and the cast seem genuinely enthusiastic, though it’s hard to see why.