Can monarchical drama really hold a modern audience’s attention?

Britain needs magic and ritual, but for many, the coronation was an empty conjuring trick

In 1953, an average of seven people, not including children, huddled around each TV set – many of them 9-inch Ekcovisions – to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The experience was like seeing “ermine-draped ectoplasm floating about at a rather bizarre seance”, recalled the journalist Ann Leslie. For colour and scale, viewers had to wait for the edited documentary film version, A Queen is Crowned, with its Shakespearean script by Christopher Fry narrated by Laurence Olivier – a combination that cleverly infused the modern royal spectacle with memories of Olivier’s wartime Henry V. But even then, there was no intimacy: the palace had forbidden close-ups. Elizabeth’s coronation was the first to be visible to most of her subjects. But it was seen at a respectful distance.

Seventy years later and, for the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla, that kindly ectoplasmic mist had burnt off into a merciless HD glare. The king – who, draped in his ermine, resembled nothing so much as an old lady in a bed jacket – wore his nerves as a mask of dread verging on misery. As he walked the great length of the Westminster Abbey church, one could see his fingers reaching for the knot of the tassel beneath his robe, repeatedly rubbing it, as if for reassurance. The unblinking camera’s eye also revealed the person who emerged as the unexpected star of the ceremony: the MP Penny Mordaunt, magnificently accoutred, her face a model of serene solemnity, as she held aloft the jewelled sword of offering. The first woman to do the job, in her guise as president of the privy council, she put one in mind of what was once said of Ginger Rogers: that she did everything that Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.

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