MONARCHS ANONYMOUS
The Other Palace
★★★★
“the silliness of this play delights a willing house”
Monarchs Anonymous started as a YouTube sketch about history’s crowned heads dragged into group therapy. It’s a family production that has since grown into a fully staged comedy at The Other Palace. The premise alone is worth the ticket: a support group for history’s monarchs, the beheaded, the grandiose and the merely bored. The audience are co-opted into the session from the outset, donning cardboard crowns and reciting the group mantra, everyone a fellow sovereign. This lends the evening a cheerful complicity. While the concept has a near-bottomless mine of potential material, the script chooses to veer towards farce, playing to the gallery. That’s the intention. The audience laps it up.
The conceit is irresistible, and the acting is excellent. William Harry Mitchell’s Henry VIII clings to his emotional support weapon, Helena Devereux’s Marie Antoinette frets for more champagne, Joshua Poole’s Charles II can barely govern his libido, and George Eggay’s Mansa Musa I grumbles magnificently about being the least known of the rulers, yet the richest. The parade of sovereigns is a visual feast that earns its applause before a word is spoken (costumes by Kathy Brazier; theme music by Richard de Winter). There are some genuinely fine gags delivered with a knowing wink. The absent Tutankhamun, we are told, has gone back to his Mummy.
The show’s warm origin is palpable, built around a kitchen table by two generations of the same family running the Ceridwen Theatre Company: Nadia and Lyon Devereux co-wrote with Nadia’s husband Joshua Poole, Nadia also directs and plays Pam while her sister Helena takes Marie Antoinette, and their mother, Vivien Lesley Jones, production-manages.
The in-built issue of such productions is the need for outside editing. The script could be tightened. The opening overstays its welcome, circling the setup long after the audience have grasped it. The evening never reaches what it’s marketed as: the actual reckoning of these damaged, grandiose souls. Instead, the plot pivots on the machinations of the therapist, Dr Thompson, played by the historian Kat Marchant of YouTube’s Reading the Past. She acts very well, but her character is the least interesting figure in the room. The genuine psychoanalysis that is marketed as the beating heart of the piece is repeatedly deferred in favour of farce.
In the second half, the monarchs shed their robes and crowns for everyday wear, and the question sharpens: stripped of regalia, who are these people? Is a king without a kingdom simply a man with opinions and a grievance? Harriet Sharmini Smithers’s Sophia Duleep Singh (suffragette and exiled Punjabi princess) lands the idea most pointedly. There is another play hiding inside this one, a play that stops winking to the gallery and lets the premise breathe. And yet, perhaps this is the treatment monarchs deserve. The more the mystery is unveiled, the sillier our own royal family looks. Perhaps, behind the palace doors, this bickering and self-regard is all any of them amounts to.
Taken on its own terms, the silliness of this play delights a willing house. The crown, as it were, is slightly askew. It is still very much worth the audience.
MONARCHS ANONYMOUS
The Other Palace
Reviewed on 24th June 2026
by Elizabeth Botsford
Photography by DMLK
