The Queen's Nanny

I started working on this play around the time the Albanese Labor Government was voted in.

Full of hope, I felt certain when the play got to the stage, we’d have lived through a successful Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum and, in an election year, movement would be ramping up about a new Republic Referendum. I wanted this play to be part of that conversation.

Instead, I write this note a week after a cabinet reshuffle, where, in the wake of last year’s referendum, the Albanese Government has abolished the Assistant Ministry for the Republic. We’re about to welcome (and spend tax-payer money on) a visit from King Charles III and Queen Camilla, who’ve just had £45M of public money added to their annual income while the rest of the UK suffers a crippling cost of living crisis.

An Australian Republic is much further away than it was two years ago.

While our Head of State is a man sovereign by accident of birth, in a country on the other side of the earth, The Queen’s Nanny is our story too. I hope it asks questions about the people our society values, and puts Marion Crawford’s story front and centre – a working clasScottish woman, shamed and ousted from the family she spent two decades of her life dedicated to.

She was a pioneer: the OG Royal memoirist. Her book was the first insight intothe Royals behind closed doors – showing them as a relatively loving, normal family. The Queen Mother’s concern about the book was warranted – what would it mean for the people of the British Empire to know they were being ‘ruled over’ and funding a family who are really a rather average lot?

 At the time, it was a PR coup for everyone but Crawfie. In the context of 2024, in a post Diana: Her True Story and Spare world, Marion Crawford’s story adds to the myriad of reasons why the Crown should be relegated to history books and Netflix series, and Australia should stand completely on its own feet.

- Melanie Tait

When Melanie first told me about Crawfie’s story - a woman who lived in the same town as her own Scottish family, who mixed and worked amongst Melanie’s own extended family and friends, after being ousted by the royals - I was surprised it was the first I’d heard of a Marion Crawford. In a contemporary world, which seems obsessed with mining all details of royal life for artistic and celebrity click bait, I was shocked Crawfie’s story was not more widely known. However, in reading the first draft of Melanie’s beautiful lyrical text, I was
instantly moved by the bold form she explores – resisting any depiction of ‘The Crown-esque’ characterisation – to create a taut, playful, yet deeply affecting commentary on power, authorship, motherhood and loyalty.

The Queen’s Nanny is a play that speaks directly to our Australian audiences, interrogating, through the fallen figure of Crawfie, wider questions around our position culturally and politically within the British Commonwealth. Through Crawfie, we are invited into conversations about who is entitled to tell whose story, and how stories handed down through history are shaped by the powerful. Melanie invites us to reflect on the voiceless women who have raised some of the world’s finest leaders and shines a spotlight on the complexities of the roles of the ‘surrogate mother’ and the loyal subject. With all of Melanie’s characteristic charm the playful humour and deft dialogue of The Queen’s Nanny, with its unequivocal celebration of theatricality, invites us to enjoy a delightful night at the theatre, while raising some rueful provocations around choice, autonomy and the manipulation of the stories we tell ourselves through our shared history.

- Priscilla Jackman

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