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| Fred Perry playing James Hewitt |
On Monday it wasn't on so we saw Interstellar instead.
On Tuesday we were late and they wouldn't sell us tickets after the performance had started.
On Wednesday I saw the matinee, and it was well worth the effort. I know it has terrible reviews, but that was because the play was critical of the media,
James Hewitt was played sympathetically by Fred Perry with tremendous presence and I suppose the character of Gina the journalist vampishly played by Terri Dwyer must have been based on Rebekah Brooks.
The icing on the cake is having an opportunity to speak to the playwright Jon Conway after the show.
At the end of the day it was not whether Diana was killed but how indifferent the establishment are to the fact that she could have been, he said.
My memory of those days was that she was riding for a fall, when she said that she had an earth-shattering announcement to make after much media speculation about how she was putting on weight.
I was not a Diana fan but once observed her coming out of the Arts Council building after I had stopped to enquire who the crowd was waiting for. Her chauffeur told me it was the Princess of Wales, and so I waited out of curiosity. She emerged soon after looking tall, elegant, smiling, charming all before her. The American lady near me said "I hope Charles knows how lucky he is." Diana waved to us all as she made for the waiting Jaguar, but made me feel as if she was waving to me personally. I waved back helplessly and irresistibly, even as I groaned inwardly remembering all the times I had complained about the vacuity of that woman and her adoring fans to my friends.
Auberon Waugh too was entranced by her and, when invited to Kensington Palace, announcing to everyone including me that he would go prepared to get lucky with a condom.
Afterwards, he never spoke of her again, because he found at that lunch that she was obsessed by trivia, status symbols and how everyone else was doing.
That beautiful women should remain mostly silent to preserve their mystery seems to be a universal rule.
I don't think Prince Philip ordered her assassination because there was no need to stop that woman from destroying her own reputation after she was freed from all the social constraints of being the wife of the future king. It was in fact a very good thing that she was being so wildly indiscreet because it utterly vindicated the Queen's decision in demanding a divorce between Charles and Diana. If she had indeed been pregnant with Dodi's child then that would only have proven what a wrong 'un she was and how right it was for the Queen to tell Charles to divorce her.
While I still believe Diana only died of not wearing a seatbelt, it was still a very entertaining romp and I thoroughly recommend it.
Ends 14 February.
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| A chance to speak to Jon Conway about conspiracy theories after the show |
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