Portrait of a Queen

Queen Victoria has proved to be considerably more durable than the British Empire. The stage has become her throne and she has moved from history into legend. For Helen Hayes, the role was the apex of an acting career. For Dorothy Tutin, 37, whose dramatic resources are rich, varied and unspent, it is more like a tiara worn with casual ele gance. William Francis' Portrait of a Queen, which opened on Broadway last week, is not so much a play as a pastiche--part documentary chronicle, part dear-diary journal, part dusty archive of political feuds. Most attractively, it is also a touching and human record of a girl's ardor, a wife's devotion, a woman's grief.

Part of the charm of the evening is that it is a profile in fealty. Victoria attributes to her subjects the same faith, loyalty and affection which she feels to wards her beloved consort, Prince Albert. Whether the Light Brigade is charging blindly to its doom at Balaklava or Londoners are weeping helplessly in the streets at the Queen's Diamond ubilee, they are doing precisely what Victoria would have done if the roles had been reversed. The simplicity of her self-concern is disarming. She is like a spoiled child of power, too unsophisticated not to tell it as it really was. Even her coronation is reduced to precise physical proportions: "I took the orb in my left hand and the scepter in my right--and thus loaded, I proceeded out of the abbey, which resounded with cheers."

It is the woman rather than the Queen who dominates the play. As Tutin interprets the role, Victoria is capricious, arbitrary, petulant and vulnerable to the men around her. The principal man in her life is Albert, a prickly foreigner, a controversial figure to press and public, but the lord of Victoria's heart. It was Albert, not Victoria, who was so all-fired prim and proper that the term Victorian was saddled on her era as a synonym for Puritan rigidity.

Victoria never wore her crown in private. To Albert she was a yielding, sensuous wife who even in her plaints on childbearing (she bore nine) felt that it was well worth the price. Victoria's grief at his death is an inundation of scalding, desolating loss.

In an extremely well-cast play, Dennis King as Disraeli is debonair and mellifluent, a prince of players who conveys the facility of the successful novelist as well as the astuteness of the statesman. James Cossins' Gladstone is a subtle creation, the portrait of an un compromising man doing an honest, thankless job for a sovereign who can not abide him. But the play belongs to Miss Tutin. In the final act, without benefit of makeup sorcery, she and Victoria edge into old age. The fatigue of existence enters her voice, slows her step, dims her eyes like a patina. It is an august portrayal of a Queen who is regal without being pompous, naive without being stupid, romantic without being sentimental.

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