As final month’s ‘No Kings’ protests throughout the US display, the spectre of the monarchy is tough to displace within the public creativeness, even for a rustic that has been with out one for 249 years. He’s a helpful whipping put up as a result of, in contrast to an autocrat or an oligarch, his divinely vested energy bears no hint of the populism that may increase thornier, self-incriminating questions concerning the relationship between topic and ruler. So, it comes as no shock that the potential of a future homosexual king of England proved to be an irresistible topic for Jordan Tannahill, whose Prince Faggot (2025) begins with an atonement of types for focusing yet one more story on the non-public lives of the royal household.
Six actors, perched on the sting of the stage as variations of themselves, talk about the ethics of speculating on the burgeoning sexuality of Prince George, whose demure expression in {a photograph} sparked an identical debate in 2017. Since that is precisely what the play units out to do, their dialog has the heavy-handed really feel of an argument you’ve in your head – a self-consciousness that the play by no means totally sheds because it guiltily indulges within the acquainted rhythms of palace intrigue. But, solely as soon as these metatextual components evolve into shows of vulnerability and transparency – the actors present their very own childhood photographs and regularly disrupt the plot to share tales from their lives – does a compelling counternarrative start to emerge.
George is dwelling from school on break, desirous to introduce his household to his new boyfriend, Dev, who’s older and of British Indian heritage. This George is power-curious, if not particularly power-hungry, talking admiringly of civic responsibility whereas additionally not pushing again too arduous on Dev’s withering anti-royalist sentiments. Like all kings, although, he has two our bodies: the bodily (he’s a ‘chaotic backside’ with a style for bondage) and the ‘physique politic’, the symbolic crown whose significance weighs closely on him. When photographs of the couple leak to the press, the prince naively expresses that the march of liberal progress has dulled his future topics’ bigotry sufficient that they’ll settle for a homosexual king and that his two selves will be reconciled.
It’s Dev who’s tasked with demonstrating, via a well-known mix of campus-born crucial principle, that such a unification is unattainable, that the blood of empire can not, in impact, be pinkwashed. Dev informs George, post-coitus, that his unmatched privilege denies him the honour of ever counting himself among the many actual faggots. Tannahill is positing a conception of queerness bifurcated between materialism and romanticism: one aspect born of marginalization and ache, the opposite a assemble of the bourgeoisie that ‘has all the time been permissible inside the halls of energy’. The play’s conception of the previous isn’t totally explicated, though it appears to derive from the identical accident of start that furnishes the divine proper of kings – that’s to say, one thing simply as immovable.
Sadly, Dev’s ethical readability doesn’t depart him a lot room to develop. It’s simply as attainable to strip a personality of his company via infallibility as it’s via helplessness. And apart from a well-timed quip about his Equinox membership, Dev’s beliefs are afforded an excessive amount of reverence to be challenged. He’s so obstinate that it’s unattainable to grasp why he endured three years of a relationship that insults the very basis of his political life. Whereas George’s internal wishes are a minimum of proven to be considerably in opposition to the elevated proficiency with which he wields his authority, Dev’s sexuality and beliefs are coterminous and subsequently flat. We’re instructed all of the the explanation why he shouldn’t be on this relationship – the demise threats, microaggressions and George’s common petulance – however by no means what made him fall in love or how he may be seduced by this proximity to energy. When late within the play the pair shares a rain-soaked reunion, it’s genuinely shocking to listen to that Dev carries a torch for George – a capitulation to the very style conventions that the manufacturing claims to scorn, proper right down to the abdication ultimatum that feels designed to entice a viewer to breathlessly hit ‘Subsequent Episode’. The tragedy of Prince Faggot can both be that class distinction in the end thwarts real love or that it makes it unattainable altogether; the play desires it each methods and consequently loses a few of its energy. Some, however not all.
If, like Dev, Prince Faggot has some hangups about its fascination with the bodily embodiment of imperialism, it deploys the metatextual components that sketch out its notion of oppositional queerness with far higher confidence. Not often has an organization of actors appeared so joyful performing collectively or so clear concerning the interaction between themselves and their characters. Self-empowerment is a frequent coda in queer narratives however one which needn’t be a cliché, not when so many views are allowed to share the identical area. It is just when the narrative is compelled to display its politics that the play falls quick on each fronts. It speaks movingly of the liberatory potential of fetish play however misunderstands the dialectic of lordship and bondage as a unidirectional energy dynamic. It’s much more comfy in its concepts concerning the king’s bodily physique than it’s about any type of symbolism that transcends it. So, it appears away from the abyss to someplace extra acquainted, if no much less affecting. It could be morally proper that the faggots discover their contentment with neighborhood and self, that they don’t signal offers with the Satan, however for a play that will get so near answering the query of what in the event that they did, it doesn’t have the temerity to grab the throne.
Prince Faggot is on displaying at Playwrights Horizons, New York, till 27 July.
Important picture: John McCrea as Prince George; Mihir Kumar as Dev Chatterjee in Prince Faggot (element), 2025. {Photograph}: Marc J. Franklin
