Marie-Antoinette

There is revolution in Paris, and bewilderment inside the Palace of Versailles. While the people protest angrily outside, Marie-Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI, have been waiting fifteen years for their execution. It keeps getting held up. There are bureaucratic obstacles, squabbles within the new government and huge power struggles among the leaders of the revolution, who seem more interested in killing each other than the royal family. Louis has now reached the point where he’s ready to take matters into his own hands: he has built one of these new-fangled guillotines for himself and his wife, although it does have a few design flaws and accidentally kills the wrong people. At the same time, an old scandal – the Affair of the Diamond Necklace – has been reignited, although nobody even remembers who was trying to incriminate who anymore. And what does this scoundrel Napoleon want – this little man who has turned up at the palace out of the blue and seems to be pursuing an agenda all of his own?

Sitting somewhere between Monty Python and Quentin Tarantino, between slapstick, sophisticated screwball comedy and opulent period drama à la Alexandre Dumas, Peter Jordan’s tumultuous deadpan comedy sheds a completely new light on a familiar subject, and its scathing barbs are highly relevant to the present day. Marie-Antoinette is also a gift to four actors, who swap positions and identities at a rapid pace.