Victoria: A Queen Unbound review – darkness lurks beneath the myth of a model royal marriage

Screenwriter Daisy Goodwin imagines the old queen revisiting her diaries and reveals a tale of control and coercion behind Albert’s dutiful devotion

When screenwriter Daisy Goodwin read that Prince Albert liked to choose Victoria’s bonnets, she wondered: was this an act of domestic devotion, or of something darker? She explored the heady early years of their relationship in a TV drama – but this new play finds a tale of coercive control within the revered model marriage.

We open at Windsor, in the dank tail of Victoria’s long reign. Amanda Boxer’s queen is a fretful owl in black bombazine, withering and imperious, if no stranger to self pity (“a poor widow with no one to support me through all my tribulations”). An inveterate diary-keeper, her children worry that the candid volumes will be published after her death.

A slanted reflective ceiling hangs over the stage in Alex Berry’s striking design, like memory’s distorting mirror. Victoria describes her diaries as “the only place where I could be completely honest”. But could she? Albert, after all, would sneak a peek – so, Goodwin speculates, the couple’s rows and resentments stayed off the page.

Jessica Rhodes’ spirited young Victoria springs from the diaries’ pages, giddily waltzing with Albert. Soon, however, he’s trying to mould her character, suppress her joy: Rowan Polonski’s lofty prince is all pique and amour-propre. He keeps her pregnant, much to her dismay (“children are invincibly tedious”), and muscles in on her royal duties: the speeches and papers, the tours of industrial Britain. He “made the monarchy so boring that no one was awake enough to start a revolution,” scoffs his frustrated wife.

Teasing becomes taunting, care becomes control and sexy times on the sofa become furious spats over Christmas presents (“You gave me a brooch made of teeth, Albert!”). The relationship is coercive, yes, but perhaps also co-dependent: Victoria’s panic keeps her obedient. A scene in which she reads from Jane Eyre signals the gothic fate which, Goodwin imagines, Albert might have planned for her.

Although Goodwin’s sympathies are clearly with the queen, Albert’s dedication to the public good is what we now require of our royals – we don’t pay solely to keep them in novels and marrons glacés. Sophie Drake’s fleet-footed production swerves the play’s contradictions and repetitions, and unsettles a myth of stodgy royal contentment.

• At Watermill theatre, Newbury, until 9 May