Reviewed by Malcolm Calder
Reviewed by Malcolm Calder
The Queen’s Nanny
By Melanie Tait
Tadpole Theatre Productions
Director Simon Prast
Set John Parker
Lighting & Sound Gareth Evans and Geoff Evans
Costume Robyn Fleming
With Anna Julienne, Laura Hill, Jack Buchanan
Pumphouse Theatre, Takapuna
Ends 24 May
Reviewer Malcolm Calder
15 May 2026
I had a lovely little evening out at The Queen’s Nanny last night.
But first a very brief history lesson.
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, initially Duchess of York, became King’s Consort in 1936 when her husband the Duke of York – known as ‘Bertie’ to intimates – ascended to the British throne as King George VI.
Throughout her life, she became an increasingly popular figure with the British – she and Bertie cutting a dashing swathe through English society when younger, Elizabeth devising outrageous cocktails and an impeccable dress sense, while her husband did his best to keep up as he somewhat trepidatiously stuttered his way to the throne. Elizabeth’s seemingly indomitable spirit provided moral support to the British public during WW2 and took on a life of its own afterwards. Privileged, eccentric and outrageous on occasion, she somehow connected with the people. I have never quite worked out why – but she did. No question.
Australian playwright Melanie Tait spans much of this period with The Queen’s Nanny, a tale of young Scots child psychologist Marion Crawford who became a governess to the royal couple’s then young two daughters initially for six months and eventually in a tenure that was to last seventeen years.
Crawford, or ‘Crawfie’ as both knew her, became the intimate companion of the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She become a trusted servant of the family and her service continued until Princess Elizabeth’s marriage in 1947, two months after Crawford’s own wedding that she had postponed for 16 years to serve the family.
So she then wrote a book about bringing up the two royal princesses, used her own name and was rather well paid. The Great British Reading Public loved her words and they sold rather well. Extremely well in fact. So did American readers who lapped them up like hot cakes. I mean to say … sensational revelations, how could they not!
But Crawfie had made something of a colossal blunder. She had omitted to ask permission from the now Elizabeth Queen Mother to do so. Who took exception to them. And that sets the scene for Tait’s play.
Crawfie was cast aside. Ignored and ostracised by the royals and treated like some kind of highly contagious, self-seeking, colonial leper. Y’know, the kind that feature in tabloids or in social media everywhere these days. How outrageous. How dreadful. How could she !
These events are explored with impressive economy by playwright, Melanie Tait, with a cast of only 3. Or maybe 15 or so if you include all the characters played by Jack Buchanan. He slides easily and quite believably through them : everything from an Australian journo (‘you’re assigned to the royals desk, son’), to a butler, to Crawfie’s husband and even to a 7-y-o Princess Eizabeth. Importantly, his characters provide an essential element in the structure of the play – giving the two prime protagonists something to bounce their lines off and providing both context and location. He does so admirably.
However the true strength of the play lies in what is not said. And Simon Prast once again handles this with subtlety and nuance. Backed up with John Parker’s simple set that uses projected moving visuals to convey location, time, space and movement. Quite effective on the small Pumphouse stage I thought.
Anna Julienne gives us an entirely believable Crawfie. Humble, dedicated and loving although childless herself, living a life that has been shaped by the family she has spent so many years tending and caring for. Selfless one might say. She aged the character remarkably well and her and her command of accents matched the say she aged the character.
I think I was looking for a little more bitterness in her Crawfie towards the end but perhaps her ritualised daily preparation of the afternoon tea and then waiting by the window on the road to Balmoral sure in her own mind that the young Queen would stop her landrover and partake of the scones said that far more poignantly.
Many years later my own father used to describe the time he met a somewhat bewildered older woman on an upper floor of a New Zealand hotel, asking in a stentorian voice when the lift was going to be fixed, where the stairs were located and was the bar open. Yes, slightly bumptious he said, with a definite presence and sense of entitlement, but he was more concerned she had addressed him as ‘boy’. That recollection probably coloured my view of Laura Hill’s Queen Mother (Elizabeth if you will).
She was exactly the Queen Mother I have always imagined, with an inimitable on-stage presence, an impish sense of humour and a superior view of the rest of the world with never a hint that she was anything but right in everything she did, thought and said.
For a time I wondered what Melanie Tait was trying to say with this play. Was she having a go at those with a worldview that is one hundred percent insensitive to others? Was she endeavouring to comment on the entrenched (to this day) British class system? Or that wealth speaks (perhaps one might substitute contemporary American attitudes and behaviours today)? Or maybe that there are social iniquities and we should simply accept them? Or personal loyalty? Or maybe the vastly changed mores of contemporary society? Or was Crawfie actually the saint many apparently believed ?
Perhaps all of these and a few more tossed in as well.
The Queen’s Nanny is not a world-shattering play, but this production is definitely a lovely little evening out.
New Zealand Arts Review 