Saturday, August 30, 2025

King Charles III once appeared in a Joe Orton play

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I knew that Prince Charles, as he then was, acted in revues when he was a student at Cambridge, but I discovered only recently he also appeared in a Joe Orton play.

Over to the Trinity College website and a page about his acting career there:

Dr Parry also cast the Prince as the padre in Joe Orton’s play [The] Erpingham Camp, originally written for television in 1966 and set in a holiday camp where the campers rebel over the strictures of the manager.

The performance was well reviewed. Student-turned theatre critic Valerie Grosvenor Myer wrote of a "pleasantly poised portrayal" by the Prince in The Guardian:

"His voice is not strong, but it is very clear, and is face is mobile: his look of shrinking pain when one of the characters used a four-letter word was extremely funny. 
"And there was a certain piquancy in the future supreme head of the Church of England taking part in a ritual where this institution is shown as pretty effete … it’s not every festival which offers the spectacle of the heir to the throne getting a custard pie full in his face."

There's a Wikipedia page on The Erpingham Camp, which was broadcast on ITV in June 1966.

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