The Audience (SUNDAY 15TH SHOW)

CrossCulture XC brings you the third production in its Theatre Series: National Theatre Live’s broadcast of The Audience is coming to Nairobi from the Western End in London. Dame Helen Mirren (The Queen, Red, The Debt and Hitchcock) and Peter Morgan (director of The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, Frost/Nixon) come together once again for a performance about Queen Elizabeth II. The audience is bound to be another spectacular production with Mirren as the head of the British crown.

For 60 years Elizabeth II has met each of her 12 Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace – a meeting like no other in British public life – it is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said. Not even to their spouses. The Audience breaks this contract of silence – and imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen. From Churchill to Cameron, each Prime Minister has used these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional – sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive.

From young mother to grandmother, these private audiences chart the arc of the second Elizabethan Age. Politicians come and go through the revolving door of electoral politics, while she remains constant, waiting to welcome her next Prime Minister.

The Audience reunites writer Peter Morgan and Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren following their collaboration on the critically-acclaimed movie sensation The Queen.

The Audience is directed by Academy Award-nominated director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours) and presented in the West End by Matthew Byam Shaw for Playful Productions, Robert Fox and Andy Harries.