It’s funny the difference a day (or a death) makes. When we first meet Empress Matilda (Madalyn McCandless), things are a little frosty between her and her daughter in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Sonia Marcon). Not least because the former – a thwarted claimant to the English throne during the bitter civil war known as the Anarchy – is supposed to be deceased. Also because the latter attempted to usurp the king (her husband and Matilda’s son) in favour of installing her son on the throne. As families go, theirs is MESSY.
That conceit kicks off writer/director Sharmini Kumar’s sparky The Regina Monologues. It's a fun idea, that these two women could meet again, many years after Matilda’s death, and talk it out. Not unlike Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the ghostly Empress comes bearing the gift/curse of knowledge. She offers an ability to look into the past, present and future in the form of three questions granted to Eleanor. They realise that most of their clashes resulted from the men in their lives jostling for the highest power that is the same time denied to them on the basis of their gender. It’s the only dialogue in this show, which is mainly made up of monologues, and sadly the only time this idea of visitations and strange powers surfaces.
Hosted at North Melbourne's Meat Market Stables, patriarchal injustice hangs heavy over this show, spinning the narratives of 13 extravagantly threaded queens, plucked from across time, continents, and a dash of mythology. Granted, these women have known struggle, but equally, they have all been gifted the power of privilege, within strict parameters. These class considerations are only occasionally addressed, but the cancer of colonialism also lurks in the work’s most intriguing strands.
Jazba Singh is outstanding as the compelling Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. Her father was the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. He was deposed, as a teenager, by the forces of Queen Victoria, who wanted the riches of India for herself. The Singh family lived out their days in the UK, with Victoria claiming Sophia as a goddaughter. But the younger woman struggled within her gilded cage. Frustratedly trying to reclaim some sense of her Indian heritage, she speaks eloquently about feeling unwelcome in either world. Sophia found her sense of purpose, rising up within the not always welcoming suffragette movement. She also calls out police brutality in an eerie mirror of times not that much changed. Seething with injustice, this sequence is also a rallying call for hope. Though her performance is more muted, Serious Meerkat is also engagingly charismatic as African Queen Nzingha Mbande. She resisted both her brother's brutality, and would-be European invaders to maintain the independence of what is now known as Angola. Meerkat commands our attentions as Nzingha revels in the power of her name, 'twisted'. She was given it as a symbol of her survival, refusing to die as an infant snared in her mother’s umbilical cord.
The determination to upend expectation also zings in a spot hung on Catherine the Great, as played by a magnificently arch Danielle Robinson. Catherine's pioneering support of inoculation is particularly resonant in our current climes, but if you've seen The Great on Stan, you already know the drill.
The promise of an 'interactive theatrescape’ for The Regina Monologues is a little overstated. Really it’s just a series of programmed monologues divided into three not entirely separate spaces. Once you've picked a queen, you sit and watch her turn through, as with any normal show. Then there's a bit of hurly burl, moving anyone who wants to to an adjacent space. Still, we managed to take in all but two queens, despite less than seamless crowd management.
Sadly there's a lot of sound bleed between these courtrooms. That means the more pronounced performers occasionally drown out their softly spoken sisters next door. Controlling the flow also caused some awkward pauses, leading a billed two-hour show to spiral out to almost three without any proper interval.
By the time everyone converged once more in the company of Mary Queen of Scots (a grand Fiona Crombie), an entertaining evening had overstayed its welcome a tad. But while the format didn't quite land, there are some royally commanding performances. It's hard to begrudge these great women their say, or the choice in how to say it.