The Last of the Duchess: Portraits of the Not-Quite-Queen

The Last of the Duchess: Portraits of the Not-Quite-Queen

22 September, 2011
by: CatherineSpoonfed

The latest play at the Hampstead Theatre follows a surge of interest in the woman who stole a king's heart.

Hot on the heels of a splurge of recent film and TV about the little known, controversial royal, the latest play at the Hampstead Theatre gives us another view of Wallis Simpson. Since the rise of public interest in the Royal Family, piqued by the extravagant nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton, there has been an odd fascination with this not-quite-queen. Perhaps it's because the figure of Wallis Simpson combines three very British concerns: the Royal Family, celebrity culture and class. Just as Britons wildly waved their bunting and cheered on 'commoner' Kate as she finally bagged Wills, in this age of celebrity when any nobody can become a somebody, Simpson's tale strikes a chord.

In contrast with the regal opulence Simpson is usually associated with, Nicholas Wright's play moves away from the glamorous image to examine the poignant fate of a lonely old woman. Based on one of the numerous biographies of the Duchess of Windsor, it focuses on the self-exile she found herself in thanks to her tarnished public image in Britain. Simpson spent the years after Edward's death in relative isolation in France, handing over legal authority to her lawyer, and it's this period of her life that is examined in The Last of the Duchess.

'That woman', as the Queen Mother famously referred to Simpson, has been given much less sympathetic treatment in the past. In what has become the most familiar cultural depiction of this vilified monarchy-wrecker, she is a stylish but brash American, the gold-digging seductress who lured a king away from his throne. She appeared in The King's Speech and television series Any Human Heart as forceful and manipulative, while the revamped Upstairs, Downstairs went as far as to suggest that she supported the Nazis.

But the findings of journalist and writer Caroline Blackwood tell a quite different story. In 1980, on a commission from The Sunday Times, Blackwood went to the French home of the reclusive Simpson to research an article about the Duchess' tumultuous and controversial life. There Blackwood encountered stiff resistance from Simpson's French lawyer and began to uncover a miserable life lived in exile, a discovery that prompted her to write not just an article but a book, which now forms the basis for Wright's play.

Wright, of course, is not the first to reconsider the Duchess's villainous image. Madonna's new film W.E., which has received an almost unanimous panning from the critics, also set out to overhaul Simpson's public image and give her a voice. The hope is that The Last of the Duchess will be rather more successful in telling this neglected other side of the story.

The Last of the Duchess runs at the Hampstead Theatre from 20 October - 26 November.

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CatherineSpoonfed