'Princess Essex' review – this witty and very welcome herstory play is full-throttle entertainment

Read our review of new drama Princess Essex, written by and starring Anne Odeke, now in performances at Shakespeare's Globe to 26 October.

Female empowerment and self-definition are seizing their theatrical moment just now, and quite rightly too. Both sides of the Atlantic have seen (different) Suffragette-themed musicals, and emancipation of varying kinds informs every rousing minute of Princess Essex.

Anne Odeke’s play began as a monologue in 2020 only to morph with time into a bustling mainstage entertainment that takes to the tricky, if capacious, Globe stage with ease. We are reminded along the way that this address keeps one foot importantly in the contemporary canon. The result gives Odeke – seen here across the classical repertoire – a chance to offer herself a stonking star part in the title role.

It helps that Odeke has a juicy topic: the first woman of colour to enter a beauty pageant in the UK, Princess Dinubolu of Senegal, in whose honour a commemorative plaque hangs in Southend, Essex. Sufficiently little is known about the actual woman that Odeke can unleash her full imagination. And so we find an origin story of sorts that charts the progression of the servile Essex local, Joanna, into a flamboyant contestant who claims a place for herself in the spotlight, as she must.

What unfolds is “a call to arms to serve a cause greater than myself,” Joanna announces exultantly, her new guise in full sail, and the Globe audience responds with the sort of full-throttle enthusiasm I’ve not encountered at a new play here since Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s ebullient Emilia in 2018.

That show got a West End transfer. Whether this one will is up for grabs: the text could do with trimming and shaping, and the collective rallying cry that results doesn’t contain much, theatrically speaking, by way of surprise. But Robin Belfield’s production has an energy that extends into the yard, and allows Odeke at full tilt to give other characters, and players, their due.

Lizzie Hopley is memorably patronising as a white employer, Mrs Bugle, who exists to be sent packing: she tells Joanna to get out of the way so as not to spoil a photo, only to discover her own, psychically impoverished position within society.

Alison Balstead does well by the role of the Batwa, a pygmy whose exoticism paves the way for the Princess to seize her moment. And tourists may well be intrigued by the rivalry posited in the show between Southend and Folkestone, two destinations doubtless new to many who surely won’t know that the former hosts a onetime amusement park, the Kursaal, that in its day was intended to put the Taj Mahal to shame.

I’m not sure that particular goal was ever achieved but this play grants its eponymous heroine a witty and welcome place in history-turned-herstory, for which huzzahs all round.

Princess Essex is at Shakespeare's Globe to 26 October. Book Princess Essex tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Princess Essex (Photos by Helen Murray)