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You can either be cynical about this knockabout stage version of Harry Enfield’s popular monarchical sitcom or you can just give in and swear fealty to its silly charms. Certainly you can’t argue you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for with ‘The Windsors: Endgame’. If you’ve not seen the TV show, you can stream it on All 4, and if you can’t be bothered to do that then basically it’s exactly what you’d expect: a wilfully ludicrous comedy about the Royal Family, so intentionally preposterous it makes ‘The Crown’ look like a sober documentary.
Much of the humour simply comes from parodying the way the royals talk – and it *is* funny, as the curtain goes up on Ciarán Owens‘s nice-but-dim Wills moaning to Kara Tointon’s fiery Kate that he never sees his brother Harry since he went off to LA with ‘Muh-gan’.
Largely recast, although notably retaining Harry Enfield’s oddball Charles, this stage length outing by George Jeffrie and Bert Tyler-Moore revolves around the Prince of Wales finally becoming king after his elderly mother abdicates. For reasons that don’t really bear repeating, his Machiavellian wife Camilla – Tracy-Ann Oberman, in fine panto villain form – manipulates him into reinstating an absolute monarchy: and it’s up to Wills, Harry, Kate and Meg to settle their differences and stop them.
Speaking of panto: Michael Fentiman’s production is not actually a pantomime per se, but it embraces many of the trappings of the form, with songs, a bit of audience interaction, and a funny metatheatrical gag about Matthew Cottie, the actor who plays Prince Edward on TV, popping up in multiple minor roles (Edward not actually being one of them). And it’s a bit bolder in tackling the, er, ‘issue’ of Tim Wallers’s snake oil salesman-y Prince Andrew than the TV show has been to date.
Beyond that: it’s a solidly silly couple of hours with a few big laughs. It pulls off the high wire act of neither being particularly mean about any of the Royals (Andrew aside) nor overly cosy about them – hardcore stans of the monarchy aside, it’s hard to see how your personal view on the IRL Windsors would have much bearing on your enjoyment. The one thing I would say about it is that Enfield feels curiously underused – it’s an ensemble show and he has a few decent lines, but as the show’s biggest star he has surprisingly little to do.
If I were to be a completely joyless theatre guy about it, I might note that ‘The Windsors: Endgame’ isn’t a patch on ‘King Charles III’, Mike Bartlett’s toweringly brilliant verse play about the Royals that actually has a not dissimilar plot. I’m not saying ‘The Windsors: Endgame’ was ever likely to be anything more than a goofy lark. But it’s not what you’d call wildly ambitious theatre. Still, it’s all good fun and existing subjects of ‘The Windsors’ won’t be disappointed.