Radio review: Elizabeth and Essex

A few words about an odd little (but in some ways huge and epic) audio drama, written by Robin Brooks as an original Radio 3 play but feeling like it has a strong theatrical connection in the sense that I can imagine Simon Russell Beale was probably going to find a way to play Elizabeth I sooner or later. Although technically in Elizabeth and Essex he's playing the writer and Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, whose writings the play is based on, and reveal him as a drama queen imagining himself as the Virgin Queen while writing his book about her relationship with the Earl of Essex. Strachey has recently become besotted with Roger (Harry Lloyd,) a much younger man who's star-struck by the writer and becomes hugely fond of him, but clearly doesn't feel anywhere near as strongly about him as the older man does, and who is gradually drawn away from Strachey as he falls for fellow Bloomsbury Group member, the economist John Maynard Keynes (Julian Harries.)

It's fair to say the stakes aren't quite the same for Strachey and Roger as they are for Elizabeth and Essex; there's still an obsession with a much younger man but not one that carries the risk of insurrection or having to have him executed, but Strachey identifies with her al the same. In reality this is a pretty slight play that reveals something of the writer's overdramatic nature but doesn't make much of a narrative; it serves primarily as an excuse to get the BBC Concert Orchestra to Alexandra Palace where they were recorded with the cast (completed by Nancy Carroll as Lady Ottoline Morrell, wealthy patroness of the Bloomsbury Group and here a gentle voice of reason and humanity among the drama, and providing a similar service for Elizabeth as Francis Bacon.)

The orchestra perform music from Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score to the 1939 film The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and at times it feels like the play is providing interludes between the music rather than the other way around. But then the music is the highlight, and surely I can't be the only one wondering how much of an influence Korngold and this score was on John Williams as there's a recurring motif that feels uncannily close to the Star Wars theme*. The play didn't really draw me in but the music is soothing, which we can all do with at the moment, and as I got to provide my own visuals I decided that SRB was gradually getting himself up in full Elizabeth I drag in the style of Robert Icke's Mary Stuart. But keeping the big bushy Lytton Strachey beard.

Elizabeth and Essex by Robin Brooks is available until the 11th of May on the Radio 3 website and BBC Sounds.

*in fact I've just looked this up and yes, Korngold's scores are something Williams deliberately referenced