Victoria: A Queen Unbound review – darkness lurks beneath the myth of a model royal marriage

Watermill theatre, NewburyScreenwriter Daisy Goodwin imagines the old queen revisiting her diaries and reveals a tale of control and coercion behind Albert’s dutiful devotion When screenwriter Daisy Goodwin read that Prince Albert liked to choose Victoria’s bonnets, she wondered: was this an act of domestic devotion, or of something darker? She explored the heady early years of their relationship in a TV drama – but this new play finds a tale of coercive control within the revered model marriage. We open at Windsor, in the dank tail of Victoria’s long reign. Amanda Boxer’s queen is a fretful owl in black bombazine, withering and imperious, if no stranger to self pity (“a poor widow with no one to support me through all my tribulations”). An inveterate diary-keeper, her children worry that the candid volumes will be published after her death. A slanted reflective ceiling hangs over the stage in Alex Berry’s striking design, like memory’s distorting mirror. Victoria describes her diaries as “the only place where I could be completely honest”. But could she? Albert, after all, would sneak a peek – so, Goodwin speculates, the couple’s rows and resentments stay