Theatre review: Princess Essex

Like most years the Globe ends its summer season with a new play, usually one that looks at historical events filtered through very modern concerns. Anne Odeke's Princess Essex doesn't buck that trend: Filling in the gaps in a true story many of whose details remain unknown, the play is inspired by a woman calling herself Princess Dinubolu of Senegal, the first black woman to compete in an English beauty pageant. So the play at times takes unflinching looks at issues of racial discrimination, particularly standards of perceived beauty, colonialism and racial fetishisation; but it does so mostly in the context of a pretty broad and bright comedy, which Robin Belfield's production approaches with energy and tongue in cheek. Odeke plays Joanna, a mixed-race housekeeper who knows nothing about her parents or early life, except that she ended up in the entertainment capital of the world: Southend-on-Sea.

When the first British beauty pageant, a new concept imported from the US, is announced in Folkestone, Joanna tries to enter but is rejected because of her skin colour. While she wants to make a point with her participation, she finds an ally with a much more concrete motive: Parsley Bacon (Matthew Ashforde) runs Southend's huge entertainment venue the Kursaal, which is struggling financially.

Worried that Folkestone is stealing Southend's thunder, Bacon announces his own rival pageant at the Kursaal, featuring a more genuinely international cast than the other one offers: If Joanna enters as Princess Dinubolu of Senegal, not only will the idea of royalty mean it's harder to object to her participation, it'll lend the event an air of exotic sophistication that'll get the press interested and sell tickets. It's a plan that succeeds a bit too well: The attention reaches Edward VII (John Cummins,) and the notoriously horny monarch decides to make a visit and a new conquest.

Much of the comic first act is spent setting up how the Kursaal pageant comes to be, and how Joanna comes to create Dinubolu: Having spent much of her life happy to fly under the radar, she's distressed at a variety show when the Colonel (Nigel Barrett) parades a captured Congolese pygmy around the stage. Joanna decides she has to rescue the man, only to inevitably discover that Batwa (Alison Halstead) isn't quite the grunting figure from the stage but an erudite, sophisticated man who's engineered the "savage" charade as much as the Colonel, and has benefitted from it as much.

The awkward, somewhat mutually judgmental relationship that builds between the pair is the most interesting one in the play, and could have become the focus of the story in itself, but it sometimes feels like it gets left on the back burner in a play that's spreading its attention too thinly in too many directions: The relationship between maid Harriet (Yasmin Taheri) and the Mayor's daughter Violet (Eloise Secker) brings in the parallel fight for women's suffrage, but the thread of the latter's flustered insistence that she's excited to be friends with Harriet for purely platonic reasons is one that's quietly dropped.

Secker's jittery performance is a comic highlight, as is Lizzie Hopley as Joanna's blustering employer, too pleased with her own status to acknowldge quite how much she relies on her housekeeper, and Hayley Grindle's brashly stereotyped national costumes for the eventual pageant bring more smiles to an already crowd-pleasing show. It's slightly imbalanced - the first act is broadly comic and can feel like it's not getting to a point, while the second leans more heavily on the serious themes and has some fairly dark moments. But if Odeke as playwright could maybe have balanced the story's contrasting tones a bit more, Odeke as performer is charming enough to, certainly by some of the reactions in tonight's crowd, make Joanna/Dinubolu the figure she's intended to be, taking one more step of progress and making it a gift to a new generation of women of colour. And it's mostly a show for all the family, apart from a couple of bits like when Edward VII sings a song about getting fisted.

Princess Essex by Anne Odeke is booking in repertory until the 26th of October at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.