What If Prince George Was Gay and Into Kinky S&M Sex?

A member of staff at New York theater Playwrights Horizons asked what play a friend and I had come to see.

“Prince F****t,” I said, making the “f****t” sound as breezy and unremarkable as possible.

Two days earlier, at Rob Madge’s excellent, award-winning solo show, My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?)a friend and I had spoken about the word “queer”—how some LGBTQ people found it uncomfortable and tricky still, a historic term of anti-gay abuse reclaimed and repurposed as a term of pride by many, but still used by bigots to denigrate.

The same linguistic hinterland is occupied by the f-slur; for some it has long been proudly re-appropriated as a badge of queer strength, resistance, and identity; for others it’s a term of abuse and still widely used and suffered as such.

It fits perfectly as the snappy title of Jordan Tannahill’s play (Playwrights Horizons, to July 13), which itself intends to be an act of confrontation and reclamation.

The play is coming on the heels of a season that saw Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! transfer from off-Broadway to become a Tony-winning Broadway smash, and Playwrights Horizons is where recent productions of Stereophonic and Teeth became the talk of the industry. Given the undeniably provocative nature of the the play’s premise and its title, could it be the next buzzy New York theater work?

Its surface subject—and one which may send the British tabloids into a tizzy—is Prince George (John McCrea), Prince William (K. Todd Freeman) and Kate Middleton’s (Rachel Crowl) eldest son, and the adult life Tannahill imagines for him as a gay man.

We see the future king of England, now 19 in 2032, coupled with a slightly older Asian boyfriend, Dev (Mihir Kumar), reveling in having his “p***y pounded” as a bottom (submissive partner in sex), doing poppers and acid, wearing a fetish mask, and—in one furious row with his father—voicing previously published accusations around William and Prince Andrew’s sex lives.

Media feverishness and racism erupt when the couple go public. Later, Prince George is surrounded by the spectral presences of Edward II, Richard the Lionheart, Queen Anne, and King James I—the allegedly gay monarchs of England’s past—with Anne pulling a latex dog hood over George’s head, attaching a leash to him.

For all that headline-grabbing, flesh-revealing spiciness, we also see William and Kate being entirely supportive of their gay son, if not ultimately of his relationship with Dev.

However, the play isn’t really about the imagined life of a gay English prince, but rather LGBTQ identities, race, power, and the selfhood of those who are not royal. Indeed, at its most pointed and passionate, the play illustrates how queer people, particularly trans people, construct their identities despite the many forces ranged against them. The juicy framing of the play is a media and audience-attracting feint.

An excellent cast—Kumar, McCrea, Freeman, Crowl, N’yomi Allure Stewart, and David Greenspan—switches between playing royals, subsidiary characters, and a version of themselves.

An opening monologue features details from Kumar’s real life, mixed with fictional elements written by Tannahill. A final monologue by Stewart is inspired by an interview with her. “All other text in the show, including the direct address monologues, is fictional, written by the playwright, and any resemblance to real events is purely coincidental,” an introductory note states, perhaps with an eye trained towards Buckingham Palace’s lawyers.

The play, directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury and with an effective (palace-to-sex-club in a blink) set by David Zinn, begins with the cast sitting front of stage pondering the seed of Tannahill’s play: a photograph of Prince George, aged 4 (he is 11 now), looking extremely fey.

Kumar notes how George was hailed as a “gay icon” when it was first published, and he and his fellow actors (significantly, bar one) mull their own childhood photographs and what signs of nascent queerness they contained.

“We know one of our own when we see one because we ourselves were once queer children,” Kumar says.

However, some of the actors scorn any attaching of labels and projections on to George—it’s inappropriate, they say, as he’s a child, and dumb to even put it out into the world considering the plethora of “groomer” insults thrown at gay people generally.

These interjections within the play, with each actor excelling in individual monologues, are sharply written and really connect—as do some of Tannahill’s zingers, like, “Frankly, I think we’ve been doing a terrible job with the grooming. I mean look how many straights there are still.”

While Tannahill and Chowdhury stage some intriguing correspondences—the ritual of sadomasochism set alongside the rituals of royal protocol, for example—the play’s projections and drama around George, Dev, William, and Kate are dull and unconvincing, despite all the moodily lit (by Isabella Byrd) drug-taking, sex, and kink. Cell-phones are locked away in pouches for the duration of the performance.

The play’s significant weakness is its writing and presentation of the royals themselves. William and Kate are shown as being supportive of George and Dev’s relationship, then suddenly revealed not to be (but why—the play doesn’t make it clear; racism we presume, but this doesn’t scan as far as their characters are portrayed).

George and Dev don’t gel as a couple either, with George the gay royal version of a manic pixie dream girl, and Dev spoiling for so many fights around racism and the royals you wonder why he got together with George in the first place if his understandable opposition to all his boyfriend and historically extended family personify is so passionately held. There is only a fleeting sense of joy and pleasure in their relationship. Dev says he is a “brown f****t” who will always be seen less favorably than a “white gay prince.”

If Dev and George negotiated these obstacles—they certainly seem to love each other at the beginning—the play’s framing might seem more solid, but it weirdly shrinks from its own dramatic set-ups. Still, Dev deploys another great zinger when George asks him if he would ever be the passive partner: “Getting f****d by the Prince of England? My ancestors would never forgive me.”

The play also doesn’t examine the characters of William and Kate with much nuance or depth; they are pallid foils for the play’s wider messaging. Why write them as central characters and leave them so unexamined, beige, and boring?

As for George’s siblings Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, the former is present but not given much to say and do, while the funny face-making latter is totally absent (the subject of a truly laugh-out moment).

George is so whiny and brattish that his outraged explosion at his father for not understanding him as a gay man rings hollow; William seems entirely understanding and just worried by his son’s wild public behavior. Perhaps unintended, one’s sympathies lie with William at this moment, trying to calm his by-now apparently drug-addicted, ranting child. Dev posits that George’s public life of rigid ritual is connected to his wild private life of obliteration.

In 2044—Charles dead, William now king—George makes clear that he wants to immerse himself in the spiritually satisfying world of kink, “tied down, strapped to a bed, a metal table with a ball gag in mouth.” A year later, Britain prepares to witness his, its first gay, royal wedding—but to who?