QUEEN AS HEROINE

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 68, 21 March 1931, Page 21

QUEEN AS HEROINE

VICTORIAN SIDELIGHTS

Quoeu Victoria is the heroine of "Palace Plays,' 3 two satires, one based on fact, the other on fiction, by -Mr. Laurence Housman. In the first of them she appears in the role, unfamiliar to most people, of a daughter in revolt, refusing on her accession to the throne at the age of IS any longer to submit to the petty tyrannies of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and very soon sending that unsympathetic character about her business. The first scene concludes with the well-known historic fact that the Queen's first action on being told of William the Fourth's death was to order her bed to be moved out of her mother's room into a room of her own. In this cool, precise revolt Mr. Housman sees the first faint beginnings of the movement for the emancipation of women. The succeeding acts show Lord Melbourne in discussion with the Queen on the question of her marriage. Mr. Housman recalls the fact that Lord Melbourne only consented to her marriage to Prince Albert on discovering that he was not her cousin, and makes use of another historical incident, Queen Victoria's discovery of the Duchess of Kent's liaison with one of the the gentlemen of her Court. Tho other play is a satire on Boyalty 100 years ago. Here, too, Queen Victoria is the unseen heroine, confronting in the person of Princess Augusta the grossness of older members of her family with her own soreno dignity and charm. The farcical element is emphasised, and tho jests have the coarseness of their time and place. The piny turns on the efforts of tho royal flukes to marry Augusta to her cousin. They face her, drunk and clumsy, as she enters the room in which a bath has been prepared for her. .She leaves them discomfited to revile each other.