Serving Elizabeth begins in Kenya in 1952, during the fateful royal visit of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Mercy, a restaurant owner, is approached to cook for the royal couple. As a staunch anti-monarchist, how can she take the job? Decades later, Tia, a Kenyan-Canadian film student interning in the London office of a production company doing a series about Queen Elizabeth, discovers that there may be more to the story of the royal visit than we have been led to believe. Although she’s been a fan of princesses all her life, Tia learns that fairy tales and real life are very different things.
Serving Elizabeth is a funny, fresh, and topical play about colonialism, monarchy, and who is serving whom — or what.
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News & Reviews
“Brings new twists to storytelling about the royal family.” —Kamloops Omega
“The dual time structure [of Serving Elizabeth] allowed Johnson to both represent the history that she found lacking in “The Crown” and comment on the role that art can play in documenting that history” — Karen Fricker of the Toronto Star. Read the full interview here.
About the Author
Marcia Johnson is a playwright and actor based in Toronto. Her plays include Serving Elizabeth, Binti’s Journey, an adaptation of The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis; Courting Johanna, based on Alice Munro’s “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” and Late. My Mother’s Ring, a short opera for which she wrote the libretto with composer Stephen A. Taylor, was nominated for a 2009 Dora Mavor Moore Award. Their second collaboration, Paradises Lost, based on the Ursula K. Le Guin novella, had excerpted concert performances by Third Angle Ensemble in Portland, Oregon and at The Gershwin Hotel in New York. Marcia Johnson is a core member of Got Your Back Canada and is a juror/dramaturg for Ergo Pink Fest, supporting, developing and showcasing the works of women and playwrights of marginalized genders.
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