October 27, 2022
Serving Elizabeth, by Marcia Johnson
Serving Elizabeth is a play by Marcia Johnson, which I bought after seeking Canadian stories about the Queen following her death last month, and it turned out to be even better than I was hoping, a really interesting complement to The Gown, by Jennifer Robson, both stories imagining the lives of the working class people behind iconic moments in the history of the royal family.
Inspired by the episode of The Crown set in Kenya, in which not a single Black actor had a speaking role, Johnson’s play tells the story of two women who cook for and serve the then-Princess Elizabeth on that pivotal tour during which Elizabeth’s father dies, she becomes Queen, and her life is transformed forever.
Mercy is working hard to run her restaurant to pay for care for her ailing husband, butting heads with her forthright daughter Faith who longs to leave her family and study at university. When the women receive the opportunity to work serving the royal couple on their tour, Mercy refuses, but Faith forges her signature on the contract.
Meanwhile in London on the eve of Brexit, Tia, a Black Canadian film student interning in an English production, learns that her own romantic ideas about the British monarchy might be more complicated than she thinks, this story line and the other woven together cleverly to become a meditation on colonialism, representation, and British history, a big picture view that made me feel as excited as I did when I encountered my favourite play—Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia—for the very first time.
