‘Everybody loves a royal fairytale/ The suckers and the cynics too’. Well, not this cynic – and particularly not when the story in question is a whimsical musical version of the romance between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, related in a fashion that falls uncomfortably between spoof and sentimentality.
Paul Tibbey and Mark Sims’s show, directed by Tibbey and Chadd Garvie, blatantly plunders previous works, with Diana’s character in particular an ‘Evita’-influenced creation. She’s viewed by lovers Charles and Camilla – who bond over a shared enthusiasm for ‘The Goon Show’, from which they adopt the pet names Fred and Gladys – first as an ‘idiotic child’, then, bitterly, as ‘Mother Teresa in Versace’.
Ultimately though, thanks to a ghostly re-appearance by the princess, post-Parisian car crash, the two women reach an uneasy truce as Camilla prepares for her own wedding to the ineffectual Charles.
That delivers a queasy happy ending of sorts but it’s all pretty pointless – especially given that royal-watchers with a taste for matrimonial flummery can soon get an eyeful of the real thing.