There are so many photographs of Queen Victoria towards the end of her 63 year long reign, it is refreshing to have this play with memories of her as a young woman.  Julian Machin has edited and retitled Katrina Hendrey’s one-woman show An Evening With Queen Victoria which starred Prunella Scales and was performed for many years.  Queen’s exciting link with the previous show is that the voice of the elderly Victoria has been recorded with Prunella Scales speaking the lines.  Every word in this show is Victoria’s own as described in her diaries and letters.

The show opens in Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in 1900 where Victoria’s letters and diary are being dictated to her eldest daughter Vicky, the Princess Royal and widow of the German Emperor Frederick III.  Grace Darling plays the young Victoria and we have her auto-biographical notes from before her ascendance to the throne, aged 18 in 1837, on the death of her uncle William IV. 

There are notes saying she was told to practise the piano more and how much she enjoyed riding in the park and going to the opera.  But where we really appreciate this attractive young woman is in her excitement at meeting her cousins.  The first time she meets Ernest and Albert she finds them not very good looking, but by the time she and Albert are both 17, in the ballroom, dancing the quadrille, she is taken with his handsome demeanour and his very blue eyes.  It is an ordinary young woman who asks the fatherly Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, at her coronation whether he likes her dress?