Merrigong Theatre Company presents The Queen’s Nanny at IPAC

Merrigong Theatre Company presents The Queen’s Nanny at the IPAC theatre from the 16th to the 19th of October. I had the pleasure of speaking with director, Priscilla Jackman where we spoke about the story and context of the play in a short interview.

Here’s what I found:

SERENA: Could you start with an overview of the play?

PRISCILLA: The Queen’s Nanny is written by Melanie Tait and I came up to the project because Melanie and I are very old friends and collaborators. We’ve done three shows together – almost 4, in COVID which got rescheduled. But, yeah, we have a real short hand with each other and are really good friends besides creating works together. So, it was Melanie who first came up with the idea of The Queen’s Nanny, based on a historical figure called Marian Crawford who actually was the nanny of Queen Elizabeth II and she’s from Scotland – in a place near where Melanie’s family are from. It was very interesting – Melanie did a research trip to Scotland and all around England and basically covered all the places where the Queen Mother and Marian Crawford lived and inhabited. Some of Mel’s family that lived there and other people actually remember Marian Crawford coming back after she had been ousted by the royal family. So, the story is that she was a Scottish nanny that came down with very high hopes of becoming an educator herself – didn’t intend to stay as the nanny but had a very close relationship with Queen Elizabeth II as a little girl. And, she’d do things like take them out in the streets of London and onto the tube and really understand the real life people for the very first time in a royal’s life. So, she did things with Elizabeth and Margaret that no other royal child had really ever done and she taught them really strong values. And as the girls grew up and after the war, she was no longer needed and so they retired her into a cottage but the Queen Mother – who we kind of see as this little old lady – was quite the diplomat and wanted to become buddies with the Americans after the war. So, a big PR campaign was started over there by an editor who said they’d love more stories on the little princesses. Marian Crawford ended up telling all of their stories in her book and it was the first book to be published that kind of showed people what happened behind closed doors. So, think about all the books that are scandalous for sharing stories on the lives of the royals, this one was actually a sycophantic, lovely book about these little gorgeous girls that she had brought up. But, the Queen Mother was absolutely offended that Marian had put her name on it as she thought that it opened up the gateway for everyone wanting a bit of the royal family, which, of course, it did. And, from that day on, Marian Crawford was completely cut off from the royals. So, even though she basically gave up her life educating the girls and essentially gave up any chances of having children of her own because basically her best years were spent there, in the end she sort of died a little old lonely lady. And, the story goes she actually bought a house on the one road to Balmoral, where the Queen spent her holidays, and she would sit at her window and watch out for Queen Elizabeth in the hopes that she would come out and visit her one day. So, it’s a really interesting historic story but actually I think it’s even more interesting the very Australian land that Melanie interrogates her story with and actually she uses the idea of the nanny or the surrogate mother as a metaphor for colonialism so it’s really a play about a fight for power in many ways as well.

SERENA: Did you take any creative liberties with the story or is it completely factual?

PRISCILLA: No, so, we don’t actually know the truth as to why the Queen Mother instigated her cruelty, as they called it, to do this story and then ousted her. We don’t know what the inner workings of all that was and Mel has taken some creative licence there. So, yeah Mel has the backbone of history but very much has created a very fun and lively but also deep and quite heart-felt story of loss, using her creative licence to sort of spin the tale of all sorts of provocative and political questions really about who we are as Australians and whether we need a monarchy or not. Those sorts of things.

SERENA: So, that kind of balances the humorous element with the more serious themes.

Exactly, Mel has got an extraordinary faculty for language and conversation and wit, so, on one level, the first half of the play you think you’re in a comedy of sorts but – as it keeps going and everything starts to unravel in their relationships and the war itself is a turning point in both of their lives historically but also dramaturgically in the play – we realise by the end of the play that there is a whole lot of sorrow and loneliness that underpins what we thought was fun at the beginning.

SERENA: And, it’s kind of ironic that this play and story is being produced in Australia as one of their colonies.

Yes, there is a deliberate Australian lens. So, it’s not like an episode of The Crown with us kind of looking in on what the royal family is doing behind closed doors, it’s very much an Australian story interrogating our places in the world. And, what it means to be a colony and to be colonised. Mel uses Marian Crawford, in one line of the play, “The colonisation of this woman began,” so, she’s forced to change her accent, she gives up her life and her happiness in many ways for the colonists and the powerful and you know what does she get back? A very Australian perspective. There’s one actor who plays many roles including the narrator who is an Australian journalist and the two main leads are the females. So, we have the Queen’s Mother, who we call Queenie or Elizabeth and then we have Marian Crawford, the nanny. So, it’s a battle of the wills of the actual biological mother of Queen Elizabeth II and her nanny. They’re played by two actors  And, the other actor plays every other part. So, one of the central roles is an Australian narrator.

SERENA: Did you want to add anything else?

It would be great to mention our creative team because it’s a really theatrical, visual feat of storytelling. Our set designer is Michael Hankin, our costume designer Genevieve Graham, our lighting designer Morgan Moroney and sound designer James P. Brown. They all worked beautifully together to create a cohesive story that is very innovative and audiences can expect to see lush costumes but also sort of innovative story-telling in the theatrical and visual feat. It’s a real gem.

For information on times and tickets, see this link.