Prince Charles, The Windsors and me: how Harry Enfield put the Firm on the stage

By early last year Bert and George have written our show: The Windsors: Endgame. It begins with the Queen abdicating and a fight for succession between Wills and Charles. Charles, under the guidance of his wicked Queen Camilla, “takes back control” as absolute monarch and returns Britain to feudal times without pesticides or roads, but with serf flogging and drownings in mud. Wills and Kate fight for a return to a constitutional monarchy – and for this they need the help of Harry and Meghan who must leave their beloved chickens and return to Britain for a right royal showdown.

Enfield with Tracy-Ann Oberman, who plays the Duchess of Cornwall on stage

OLIVER ROSSER

But Covid happens and everything gets put on hold. Then, last September, George dies suddenly at the age of 56. It’s a tragedy for Bert, who has written with George for three decades. And to a lesser extent, for me. I’ve worked on and off with Bert and George for 20 years, and have spent some of the happiest moments of my professional life writing with them and giggling like an idiot. On a personal level, George was one of the nicest blokes I’ve ever met. It is a desperately sad time.

But the show must go on, and in July this year the Prince of Wales Theatre becomes available from August until October. It is such short notice that only a few cast members from the TV show are available. The rest of the family must be recast in two weeks.

And so we end up in a Shoreditch rehearsal room for our first read-through. Our director, Michael Fentiman, who is also new, has been poached from his show Amelie the week before, and exudes a chirpy confidence. This skilfully masks his lack of time to prepare.

The read-through goes well, but the new cast are apprehensive. Are they expected to play their parts as they were performed on TV? Or can they do their own thing, be different to television but right for the play? I can see as we read that many of the new eyes are on Michael, who is laughing, but also thinking hard about how to stage what he’s hearing. They are also glancing at Bert, to see his reaction to their readings.

I realise I have to be George. Having spent two decades with Bert and George in writers’ rooms and rehearsals, I knew how they worked together. They were like a mother and father to their jokes. George, the mother, found the birth of a joke painful, but from then on he thought the sun shone out of his joke’s arse. Bert, the father, found the birth fairly fuss-free, but always seemed to worry that his joke might be a bit of a disappointment, or could do better in life. So in read-throughs George roared with unconditional laughter each time he heard one of his own jokes; Bert sat nervously, his frown relaxing slightly if a joke landed the way he hoped, but his brain simultaneously buzzing with thoughts on how to improve it.

During the read-through I deliver my Prince Charles in a pretty slap-dash manner. I’m not thinking about it yet. I’m letting myself enjoy every silly joke and every new performance, as George would have done. It’s a cracking script, involving love, live sex, torture, songs, a sword fight to the death and up-to-the-minute satirical heavy petting: “Do you mind if I Matt Hancock your buttocks?”

At the end of the read-through, three things are obvious. The new cast members are nervous. There is room for improvement in the script. It’s going to work.

I’ve only ever done two plays. But I like the theatre and go a lot. For every play that disappoints, is up its own arse, is preaching to the converted, there is another that makes you laugh properly (London Assurance), makes you think properly (This House), or makes you laugh and think properly (Ink).

Kathryn Drysdale, Richard Goulding and Harry Enfield in The Windsors

PLANET PHOTOS

The read-through runs at 1 hour 40 minutes – so with songs and laughs it will be about 2 hours. Michael, Bert and I agree this is too long. This is a rare thing in the theatre. Nearly every play is too long. Why? When did we ever leave a theatre with the audience muttering, “Well, that was too short”? Because in the theatre directors have no time limit, they tend to treat the script as a sacred text. “Let us work on the text,” they say – not meaning chop out the flab, but examine the marvellousness of it all, and look for hidden depths and subtle nuances in the boring flab. And because most theatres are too hot, hidden depths and subtle nuances are often lost on snoring audiences.

My two plays were both too long. The first, Once in a Lifetime at the Young Vic, was an 80-year-old comedy from an age when humour was gentler and people had a longer attention span. The director, Richard Jones, had to go to the estate of the long-deceased writers each time he wanted to snip the text, and was more often than not rebuffed. I didn’t arrive on stage until 30 minutes into the play. This first half-hour was laden with plot and almost joke- free, so that by the time I arrived much of the audience was asleep. I was directed to storm on stage shouting and yelling (I was the boss of a movie studio) and make for a chair right at the front, in which I was to sit and continue to bellow instructions to my on-stage underlings until the audience woke up. One matinee I found myself yelling at an old lady whose head was slumped in her lap. Her chest was heaving so she wasn’t dead. I can still see the eyes of her mortified companion as I barked away in vain.

Bert and I come from television, where there is no wriggle room if your 30-minute show is running at 34 minutes. You have to be ruthless. Michael agrees that it should be 90 minutes max. It should crack along and leave the audience feeling happy and blissfully awake.

So Bert starts cutting flab and adding jokes. It’s obvious to the new cast members that the TV show is a blessing and a curse. They are acutely aware that they want to be as good as their TV counterparts, and feel that burden. “The history of past generations bear like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” wrote that well-known luvvie Karl Marx.

I discuss these worries first with Tracy-Ann Oberman, who has replaced Haydn Gwynne as Camilla. Tracy-Ann and I are near neighbours, so I give her a lift in most days on my moped. On these journeys we discuss our roles. Should she mimic Haydn’s Cruella de Vil? As we wobble towards Shoreditch at 20mph I yell over my shoulder that this is a show that could run in London, Manchester and Edinburgh simultaneously. Everyone knows the royal family and loads of actors could play them and make the show a success. Because it’s funny. And each cast would play their characters differently. Tracy-Ann’s Camilla will be to Haydn’s Camilla what Heath Ledger’s Joker was to Jack Nicholson’s. I’m not sure if Tracy-Ann can hear my persuasive jabber because she goes quiet, and when we arrive in Shoreditch asks what I was saying about Hampstead Heath. But my ponderings on her Camilla come to pass: Tracy-Ann’s Camilla is not Cruella – she’s a fun-lovin’ sadist, full of joyous hatred and mischief.

The rest of the new cast gradually lose their anxieties and start to grow into their parts. Ciarán Owens, our new Wills, transforms into Wills the Matinee Idol, full of swashbuckling sincerity and righteousness. Kara Tointon becomes his beautiful Kate, a woman who truly believes in her noble role, but betrays her gypsy roots and resorts to bare-knuckle fighting when crossed. Crystal Condie becomes our Meghan – strong, dedicated to her life of vapid podcasts very much in control of Tom Durant-Pritchard’s hilarious, hapless Harry.

My former common-law stepdaughter (life’s complex) and friend Lily Allen is rehearsing her first play, 2.22 (at the Noel Coward), in the next-door rehearsal space. We have lunch in what is her first week, and she’s terrified. I empathise – I was in her position five years ago. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve played the Hammersmith Apollo or the Pyramid Stage, being in a play with experienced theatre actors confirms you’re a fraud. How the hell do they learn all those lines? I tell her to put herself completely at the disposal of Matthew Dunster, her director.

There are five very funny songs in The Windsors: Endgame. Singing and dancing is not my forte. I can scrape by with the singing, but the big end dance piece is a problem. I’m positioned behind Kara, who won Strictly, and our young understudies, all of whom are trained dancers. Three weeks into rehearsals, the cast dances in unison, except for Prince Charles, who flails like an octopus caught in a fishing net. Kara and the understudies are patient with me, making me feel like I’m in an old people’s home and these lovely young people have come to give me a music and movement class.

Tom, who joined The Windsors as Prince Harry two years ago, finally told me today that I’d seen him in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus when he was at Marlborough College. My goddaughter Charlie was in the play, as was Jack Whitehall, both of whom I remembered but not Tom. He was suitably gracious – why would I remember a boy in a school play from 16 years ago? But because I’d remembered Jack Whitehall it stuck with me and I felt bad about it. Until this afternoon, when I was telling Tracy-Ann about the last play I did at Hampstead Theatre a couple of years ago. As I described the plot she began to frown: “I think I might have seen that – but I don’t remember you in it.” The further I got into the play’s storyline, the more emphatic Tracy-Ann became. She definitely had seen it and she definitely didn’t remember me.

Tracy-Ann and I have to go on ITV’s This Morning to promote the show. Everyone’s a bit Covid jumpy, but we’re all double jabbed and tested twice weekly and we know the audience will be too. ITV’s Covid supremo has declared Tracy-Ann must not arrive on the back of my moped, in the fresh air, with our faces covered in helmets, but for Covid safety’s sake, must travel in a car with closed windows driven by a total stranger. She’s brilliantly accomplished, describing The Windsors as “The Crown based on fact”. In this and other interviews I’m asked what I think of the real Prince Charles. I reply (truthfully) that I’d sooner he was absolute monarch than Boris Johnson PM. We seem to do a good job and tickets start to fly.

At 60, I’m at least a decade older than the others. I’m also overweight – or as the butcher I go to in Cornwall said when I appeared after a year stuck in London, “Blimey, Harry – someone’s scoffed his way through lockdown.” Luckily, last week my moped was stolen by a “rogue” (this is what the police actually called him). So now I’m on my dad’s old pushbike, without Tracy-Ann but with a slightly leaner frame.

Three weeks in and Lily and I find time to grab another bite, and she’s a different person. She’s enjoying herself. On the Saturday I bump into Matthew Dunster in the street, and he tells me, “Each week with Lily is worth a year at drama school.” I call Lil that evening to tell her. Secondhand praise always feels more valuable than that from the horse’s mouth.

Today is the birthday of Eliza Butterworth, who plays one of Fergie’s daughters. I was once driving my six-year-old daughter and her friend to school when the friend piped up, “Grandpa’s coming to stay tonight. He’s very old.”

“How old?” I ask.

“Eighty.”

“Guess how old I am.”

“Eighty?”

Many years have passed since then, and now I am 60, I’ve reached the age where the problem this little girl had is reversed. Anyone under 35 looks indeterminably young. After we sing Happy Birthday I guess her age. “Twenty-one?” She chuckles and I can’t read her chuckle-tone. Panic rises: “Is she 20? Or worse, 19?” That she won’t tell me her real age surely confirms my faux pas. So I have to ask her directly. She’s 29. I’m relieved. No big deal, just confirmation of the increasing speed at which I hurtle towards the grave.

It was George’s birthday today too. He would have been 57. He would have loved what we’ve done with his words.
Harry Enfield stars in The Windsors: Endgame at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London W1 (thewindsorsendgame.com)

Shoot credits
Grooming Katrin Rees at Carol Hayes Management using Tom Ford