The generally perceived impression of Victoria and Albert is of a happy couple, with Victoria devastated by Albert’s early death and spending the rest of her life mourning for him.

Daisy Goodwin’s play shows it in a very different light. At the start, we see Victoria in a wheelchair near the end of her life in conversation with her eldest son Bertie. They bicker and Victoria blames him for Alfred’s death. Victoria has kept extensive diaries over the years, which Bertie wants to see, and the diaries play a major part in the play.

The scene changes and a young Victoria meets Albert for the first time. He is dashing and handsome, she falls for him immediately and they dance. This leads to a proposal from Victoria and they get married.

She quickly becomes pregnant (with Bertie) and then things start to go wrong. Seven years later she has had five children with a sixth on the way. Meanwhile Albert has been taking over more and more of her responsibilities as Queen, leading to acrimonious arguments and after the interval Albert, no longer young and handsome, puts more pressure on her to do his will.

After her death, her youngest child Beatrice edited the diaries to remove anything that might upset the royal family and most of the originals were then destroyed, so we don’t know what Victoria might have said about her relationship with Albert.

The cast of six were excellent. Amanda Boxer as Victoria in her wheelchair was magisterial with Bertie and Beatrice, insisting they exit from her presence backwards. Jessica Rhodes as Young Victoria handled the change from eager young queen to downtrodden subordinate perfectly, as did Rowan Polonski as Albert, moving in the other direction from inferior to superior. Stephen Fewell as Bertie had the confidence of a future king, bringing much humour to the part and Lydia Bakelmun as Beatrice helped and supported her mother throughout her later years. Steve Chusak as Dr Reid was most respectful of the queen who liked and trusted him

There were welcome touches of humour throughout, especially from Bertie.

There was a lot of interaction between Victoria and Young Victoria – sounds strange but it worked well.

Alex Berry’s set comprised an empty stage with an occasional bust of Alfred on a stand in the middle and a sloping glass ceiling which reflected the cast on the stage and showed a projection on the wall behind, usually a load of books, presumably her 122 volumes of diaries. Very unusual.

Directed by Sophie Drake, this is a gripping production giving a very different view of the relationship between Victoria and Albert than the one we’re familiar with. Highly recommended.

PAUL SHAVE

Some difficult truths exposed

Daisy Goodwin's play offers insights into Victoria & Albert's much mythologised marriage

Would Queen Victoria be amused by this interpretation of her relationship with Albert as delineated in her diaries? Probably not, though Daisy Goodwin’s play offers a contemporary audience insights into this much mythologised marriage that are moving and witty in equal measure.

A bust of Albert is on a pedestal centre stage, its cold marble hinting at the character beneath his youthful dashing looks. A sloping mirror above the stage at once creates something of a claustrophobic library but also distorts the images of the characters beneath so raising the question of what is true and what is skewed through mediation.

The actors are well cast. Amanda Boxer plays the aged imperious Victoria. Jessica Rhodes is at once the slightly acerbic but vulnerable young Victoria. Bertie, desperate to know what will happen to his mother’s diaries not least because he fears, with just cause, what they may say about him, is played with humour by Stephen Fewell. In contrast, Lydia Bakelmun gives a sensitive portrayal of loyal, forbearing Princess Beatrice.

The play skips back and forth through time but the transitions are seamless and allow for sensitive conversations between the dying Victoria and her younger self. The young queen’s initial delight with her handsome, though stiffly Prussian, husband, played as an upright and somewhat humourless character by Rowan Polanski, is soon clouded by her constant state of confinement and his increasing control over her. The marital tension heightens as the play progresses. Keeping Victoria pregnant appears to be part of Albert’s plan to make himself regent. Victoria appears relieved when he dies before this can come to pass.

She repeatedly states that she and Albert had fun, though her passion perhaps exceeded his. As she gets older such memories become more wistful. While they were heavily dependent upon each other this was not necessarily for the same reasons.

This excellent play illustrates that you can’t always trust what you read. Diaries, like millions of other documents, may be edited and redacted. After all, you never know who might read them.

ANDY KEMPE

Darkness lurks beneath the myth of a model royal marriage

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.

DAVID JAYS

Have we got Prince Albert all wrong?

Daisy Goodwin created and wrote the ITV series Victoria, which ran for three series from 2016 to 2019. So what might she have left to say about Britain’s second longest-reigning monarch in this new chamber drama that premieres at the intimate Watermill Theatre in Newbury?

Plenty, it turns out. And if Victoria: A Queen Unbound has more ideas about Victoria’s marriage to Albert than it has the time or patience to finesse into what feels like a finished shape, its dialogue crackles with enough life and ideas to make its two hours move at a clip.

Was the ideal royal marriage actually the ideal royal marriage? What if Victoria’s German cousin was actually a cold fish who exerted what’s now called coercive control over his besotted but otherwise sharp-minded wife and monarch? Who gaslit her into thinking her temper was worrying rather than perfectly understandable?

Goodwin’s play starts in 1901 as an ailing Victoria looks to define her legacy. Not that this 81-year-old monarch is going quietly: Amanda Boxer has good withering fun as a mum and monarch who still fat-shames her feckless son Bertie (Stephen Fewell) and chides her daughter Beatrice (Lydia Bakelmun).

Within that framework the bulk of the show is Victoria looking back at her 40-year-gone marriage, rereading her own diaries. “We were so happy,” says old Victoria. “Were we?” says Jessica Rhodes (excellent) as young Victoria, embarking on a series of difficult and, on this stage, cramped conversations with her pragmatic, power-grabbing hubby (Rowan Polonski).

Goodwin’s programme notes set out her stall cogently. The play itself, which keeps to a trim 50 minutes each way plus interval, doesn’t give itself room to do much more than raise the topics. Did Albert resent being second banana? Did he relish having to go and open factories in the regions while she was busy with children? Did he disapprove of her frivolous fondness for reading novels? “What sacrifices have you made, Victoria?” he chides. “There are nine of them in the nursery,” she ripostes.

Historians can debate whether Goodwin is right to say that “it is quite likely” that Victoria’s diaries are deliberately overpositive about her marriage, and whether that’s because Albert may have been reading them. Or indeed whether she had a cheeky chuckle at the thought he might be remembered as “my dearest darling who chose my bonnets”. Without more room for the characters to sprout a third dimension, scenes where Victoria starts off strong then ends up caving to Albert don’t wholly convince.

But there is wit and sympathy here — even to the priggish Albert. It may not be very distinguishable from a radio play (Alex Berry’s natty period costumes notwithstanding), but Sophie Drake’s production handles Goodwin’s witty, idea-heavy, slightly circular arguments so capably that I found myself consuming them very happily. Even when I couldn’t entirely believe that real human beings spoke them.

DOMINIC MAXWELL