By Coral Gables Gazette staff
Before Netflix. Before Claire Foy and Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton. Before six seasons and a dozen Emmy Awards and the most-discussed period drama in streaming history. There was a stage, a single actress, and a question that Peter Morgan had been circling for years: what was Queen Elizabeth II actually like when no one else was watching?
The Audience answered that question on a West End stage in 2013. It is the play that became The Crown — the source material Morgan drew on when he expanded his theatrical imagination into six decades of royal history for Netflix. And on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, April 3 through 5, the Coral Gables Art Cinema screens the National Theatre Live capture of the original production, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Helen Mirren in the performance that won her the Olivier Award in London and the Tony Award on Broadway.
Tickets are $20 for non-members and $16 for cinema members. Friday’s screening features open captions for deaf and hard of hearing audiences. The film runs three hours including an intermission.
The play and what it does
The constitutional convention at the center of The Audience is real. Every week, for the entirety of her reign, Queen Elizabeth II met privately with her prime minister — a meeting with no agenda, no notes, no witnesses, and no public record. What was said in those rooms was known only to the two people present. In 60 years and across 12 prime ministers, the conversations ranged from matters of state to moments of personal candor that no formal channel of British governance could have produced.
Morgan takes that privacy and imagines it. The play moves through seven of those relationships — from Winston Churchill, who advised Elizabeth in the first year of her reign and condescended to her in ways she quietly and firmly dismantled, through Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, and David Cameron. Each encounter is its own small drama of power, deference, personality, and the particular intimacy that develops when two people meet in a room, week after week, for years.
The formal conceit is brilliant and the writing is at Morgan’s best. He is a playwright and screenwriter who has spent his career asking what happens in the private spaces of public power — in Frost/Nixon it was a series of television interviews, in The Queen it was the days following Diana’s death, in The Crown it was the entire arc of a reign. The Audience is the most compressed version of that project: one woman, one room, one constitutional ritual, 60 years.
The performance at the center
Helen Mirren had played Elizabeth II once before — in Morgan’s 2006 film The Queen, which earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Returning to the same subject on stage, she found something the camera could not quite capture: the physicality of authority, the way a woman who has spent six decades in a role that requires her to be both present and inscrutable carries herself in the body.
The reviews from the original West End run were unanimous. The Daily Telegraph gave it five stars. The Times gave it five stars. The Independent gave it five stars and the line that appears in the cinema’s own promotion: “Helen Mirren makes The Audience a right-royal night out.” She won the Olivier Award for Best Actress for the London production and the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play when the production transferred to Broadway in 2015.
The screening at the Coral Gables Art Cinema is the live capture of the original West End production — Mirren, the original cast, the Gielgud Theatre, the audience that was there in 2013. It is returning to cinemas for the first time in over a decade.
Morgan, Daldry, and the lineage of the work
Peter Morgan is one of the most decorated writers working in the English language across any medium. He has received Academy Award nominations, five BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards. He wrote Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Rush before creating The Crown, which ran for six seasons and became Netflix’s defining prestige drama. His particular gift — the ability to find the human being inside the historical figure without softening or sentimentalizing either — is nowhere more purely expressed than in The Audience, where the entire dramatic weight of the play rests on what two people say to each other when the doors are closed.
Stephen Daldry, who directed the production, is one of the few directors to have received Academy Award nominations for three separate films — Billy Elliot, The Hours, and The Reader — as well as two Tony Awards for his stage work. His collaboration with Morgan on The Audience produced something that the critics recognized immediately: a piece of theatre that worked both as intimate character study and as an argument about the nature of constitutional monarchy.
The Crown cites The Audience in the credits of its first episode. The debt is acknowledged and the lineage is clear. Saturday afternoon at the Coral Gables Art Cinema is the place to see where it began.
THE AUDIENCE — NATIONAL THEATRE LIVE
What: NT Live screening of the Olivier and Tony Award-winning West End production When: Friday, April 3 / Saturday, April 4 / Sunday, April 5 at 1 p.m.
Where: Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables
Admission: $20 general; $16 cinema members
Accessibility: Open captions available at Friday screening
Runtime: 180 minutes including intermission
Tickets: coralgablesartcinema.com
