Theatre: The badness of George the Fourth

BATTLE ROYAL LYTTELTON THEATRE LONDON

PRINCE WILLIAM is reportedly "devastated" and no wonder. First the "campaigning" Express, in a classic case of the unreadable in pursuit of the unspeakable, lets loose the dogs of bogus indignation on him, claiming that, by joining the hunting pack, he is dishonouring his mother's memory. Then Diana materialises at the Liverpool Tate as a statue of the Virgin Mary. And now in the Lyttelton, the National Theatre premieres Battle Royal, a new play by Nick Stafford, in which Diana is obliquely resurrected in the shape of the 18th-century Princess Caroline of Brunswick, whose fate weirdly anticipated hers.

The wife of the future George IV, she was a Princess of Wales who had also been married as an official convenience by a prince who not only harboured a Camilla Parker Bowles figure behind the scenes, but had actually wed her beforehand, even though she was a Catholic. Caroline, too, became persona non grata with the Royal family, went abroad, took a foreign lover and met a premature end.

The difference is that Caroline survived long enough to create trouble when George assumed the throne. Manipulated by politicians for their own republican ends, she returned to England as the Queen of People's Hearts and starred in a scandalous divorce trial, prior to being spectacularly barred from the Coronation. Stafford's play goes back to the past in order to speculate on how things might have been in our own day, had Diana been extrapolated into the future.

True, Howard Davies's production boasts some fine performances (from Zoe Wanamaker who, as the sad-clown-faced, frizzy-wigged, gutturally Germanic princess, floods the stage with the princess's comically oddball, strongly poignant presence and from Simon Russell Beale as the damaged, compensatingly self- pampering prince). All arrogant plosives. Matthew Macfadyen is superb as Brougham, the brilliant defence lawyer for the princess and expert mobiliser of public opinion.

But the play itself fails most tests as drama. For a start, it is too plodding to possess any interest independent of its contemporary parallels. Trudging flat-footedly through the history, it never grabs the material by the scruff of the neck in order to bring out its metaphoric meaning.

The unflattering comparison is with Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III which, ironically enough also included a portrait of this Prince of Wales and also played in this theatre. But, in examining the monarch's malady, Bennett's play was an extended thought-provoking pun on the different meanings of the word "constitution", the body personal as a microcosm of the body politic.

Granted a spurious dynamism by the contrary revolves which sweep colonnades in opposite directions, there's nothing remotely as resonant or re-applicable as that in this badly (no scarcely) edited piece. Diana is destined to continue popping up in our drama. One hopes that next time she will arrange to reappear in a less parasitic and pedestrian affair than Battle Royal.

In rep, 0171-452 3000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper