During the summer months they thrilled to the medieval equine skills on display in the live show of Chevalery and in the

During the summer months, they thrilled to the medieval equine skills on display in the “live show of Chevalery”, and in the velvet evenings, they sat entranced as the night sky above them was criss-crossed with laser beams as part of the son et lumiere.
For those of a more historical turn of mind, the Torture Museum detailed the methods used by the Inquisition to root out the Cathar heresy, and in the museum of Le Moyen-Age dans la Cite, a series of wax tableaux depicted life in the Middle Ages, with explanatory texts on the wall (and piped music).Noting the visitors’ insatiable appetite for souvenirs, the shopkeepers obligingly provided them with a bewildering array of relics. In time, coach and car parks were built, a tourist office was installed in the Porte Narbonnaise and a train dropped yet more visitors outside the imposing drawbridge. A Cathar stronghold during the 12th century, Carcassonne fell to the Albigensian Crusade in 1209, and then for 400 years it guarded the Franco- Spanish border – until the latter moved south. Derelict shops and houses were refurbished and 50 rounded towers with pointed roofs graced the city’s walls once more. But if the real-life William were to give his detectives the slip and attend a performance at Birmingham incognito, what he saw would do more for his self-esteem, you guess, than watching, say, the video of his mother’s Panorama interview.n ‘The Prince’s Play’, now previewing, opens Friday, Royal National Theatre (0171-928 2252) ‘Divine Right’ opens Friday, Birmingham Rep (0121-236 4455).

In 1844, a French architect, Viollet-le-Duc, and an archaeologist, JP Cros-Mayrevieille, began the reconstruction of a crumbling fortress at Carcassonne, in south-west France. Could this outfit have brought itself to help Whelan to earn royalties from a republican drama, you wonder? True, in daring to lay out his future for the young prince, Whelan’s play is as presumptuous as we all feel we’ve a right to be when speculating and fantasising about the royal family. One should not forget, though, the initial difficulties Richard Eyre experienced at board level when trying to programme Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution which (flatteringly) showed the reigning monarch in a cagey cat-and-mouse game with Anthony Blunt.As it happens, Peter Whelan, whose Divine Right is being produced at the Birmingham Rep, has another play in rehearsal at the moment with the Royal Shakespeare Company (President: Prince Charles). The fact that this can be staged at the Royal National Theatre would be grist to the mill of a defender of the monarchy such as Charles Moore, who once pointed out that the Charter 88 debate on this institution tellingly took place in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. “My reprieve and pardon were a prince’s plan/ to drag my daughter to his soiled divan,” wails Lord Kintyre.The exigencies of the story don’t leave much room for glimpses into this Prince of Wales’s ontological plight nor for a rehearsal of the mitigating circumstances of his upbringing.

For once, you’re allowed to feel the full pernicious blast of corrupt privilege. Recounting the imaginary tale of Francis I’s seduction of the daughter of his jester Triboulet, the play fell foul of the counter- revolutionary censorship in the Paris of 1832 and was not revived for 50 years after its first performance. Harrison translates the action to Victorian England; the jester becomes Scotty Scott, a music hall comedian and Francis I switches to the future Edward VII presiding over a court where the royal lust is pandered to for preferment or pardon. After all, the heath may radicalise King Lear, but it’s King Lear, not the needy, who remains the focus of attention and when Jude Kelly’s recent production tried to offset this by having a large group of the destitute follow the mad monarch about like a silent chorus, you felt irritation rather than compassion.Sue Townsend is a self-proclaimed Republican. It is, however, virtually a law of the theatre that monarchy upstages whatever it comes near; it will be interesting to see how Bill Alexander’s production of Divine Right guards against this happening in the scenes with the Prince. With its horrendous levels of unemployment, its gangs of lawless youths and its spirit of skin-of-the-teeth survival, the estate is meant, in theory, to be the central concern, the dethroned Windsors our piquant perspective on it. Shaw’s Apple Cart offers a precedent for this when its monarch, King Magnus, steals the initiative from the democratic government that wants to reduce him to a cipher by threatening to abdicate and lead a rival political party in the Commons.In The Queen and I, an already elected Republican government has dispatched the royal family to live in poverty on a Midlands council estate.

But it’s significant that, like The Queen and I, the Sue Townsend play with which Out of Joint had a great success a couple of years back, Divine Right is a Republican play that turns on the mischievous paradox of conscripting a royal to its cause. Arguments over the role and function of a President are valuably aired. Interspersed with the episodes depicting the Prince’s crash course in underling life are scenes set in the House of Commons and at private meetings of members of the touchily all-party Republican movement, which highlight the differing motives and objectives that can bring, say, a rich New Tory of working class origins under the same banner as a principled female Labour MP who feels that her party isn’t sufficiently distinguishable from the opposition. Where the disguised Henry is dismayed when he discovers that the common soldiers are sceptical about the king and his cause, this pattern is reversed in one of Whelan’s episodes. The disguised Prince, sporting a bomber jacket and an accent picked up from EastEnders, is appalled to find the most aggressively staunch support for royalty in a couple of crop-haired, mindless fascist yobs in combat gear who believe “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack!” In fact, the only time William gets beaten up on his travels is when, in a ruefully self-referring aside, he remarks in front of this pair that the Prince “really is stupid”.Divine Right is avowedly Republican in spirit and intent. Had Prince Charles ever felt like doing the same? Yes, while he was at Cambridge he’d attempted to do the same thing but the results were disastrous.”Before he makes a decision about whether to accept the succession in Divine Right, it just so happens that Whelan’s Prince William succeeds in giving his detective the slip and in heading off on just such an incognito adventure into those areas of England that are a foreign country to its future king. With implicit reference to Henry V, the play arranges some nicely barbed ironies.