In the New York City tabloid game, an apothegm from the 1970s or ’80s used to be passed down reverently from old hack to young buck: “You can say whatever you want about the mafia. They’re not going to hold a press conference to denounce you.” As for the Firm across the Atlantic—the Cosa Windsor—you can say pretty much whatever you please about its members, too. Her Majesty isn’t going to sit down with the BBC to explain what you got wrong.
That Queen Elizabeth II has managed to float above it all for more than sixty years—on September 9 the duration of her reign will surpass that of Victoria—is central to her mystique. But who is Betty Windsor at home? The playwright Peter Morgan provided an appealing answer in his 2006 screenplay for The Queen, in which Stephen Daldry directed Helen Mirren to an Academy Award. Mirren, Morgan, and Daldry’s Elizabeth R., thrown off course by the calamity in that Paris tunnel, was earthy, practical, canny. She was at ease with a wrench yet baffled by the family wench: Diana, a problem even in death.
The Queen, though necessarily a work driven by Morgan’s imagination, mostly seemed plausible. Now Morgan, Daldry, and Mirren have reassembled to put Her Majesty on stage, this time in the more broad, and thematically suspect, The Audience (at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre through June 28), which purports to draw back the curtain on what might have been
