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A new Off-Broadway play has a shocking title, but it plays against something familiar: our obsession with the private lives of royals. Prince Faggot, which reopened on September 11 after a sold-out summer run, imagines Prince George all grown up, as a young gay man whose personal life is under constant scrutiny.
Playwright Jordan Tannahill was partly inspired by photos of a four-year-old Prince George that went viral in 2017. The prince perched in the open door of a helicopter, daintily clutching his face in apparent elation. Online, people dubbed him a “gay icon” and speculated about his future orientation. (To be clear, the royals have yet to make a public comment on the sexuality of the heir to the throne, who is currently 12 years old.) The pictures also got Tannahill’s attention. “Making no comment on George’s sexuality, whatever that might be when he grows up,” he says now to Town & Country, “they really reminded me of photos of myself as a young gay child”—expressive, unguarded, and unfiltered.
Tannahill wrote his first draft of the play in 2020 while living in London. He hoped to produce it there, but says “it frankly proved too controversial.” Understandably so: the show imagines a grown-up George’s love life in graphic detail. The casting might also ruffle feathers across the pond: the queer ensemble includes a Black, gay man as the Prince of Wales, a trans woman as his wife, and a Black, trans woman as Princess Charlotte. The script critiques the monarchy, but Tannahill insists Prince Faggot isn’t “some kind of takedown of the crown or broad satire.” He sees the characters as “fallible [and] complex” people in a play about queerness.
Critics have acknowledged that complexity. Vulture’s Jackson McHenry noted the “delicate and rich territory” Tannahill explores, while quibbling with the dramatic structure and praising the direction. New Yorker critic Helen Shaw called it “intermittently superb,” while the New York Times‘s Jesse Green said it “finds its way to splendor.”
Tannahill is joining a long line of writers drawn to royal speculation. In 2011, around what would have been Princess Diana’s 50th birthday, imagining her later life became a cottage industry. Monica Ali wrote a novel with Diana staging her own death and escaping to America; Newsweek ran a cover story that imagined her seeking out “strategic” Botox and trying “at least two” marriages. Onstage, the 2014 faux-Shakespearean succession drama King Charles III was a hit in Britain and later reached Broadway. And on screen, a fictionalized version of Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) has been central to the success of Bridgerton and a spinoff series bearing her name. In a less speculative vein, Peter Morgan has made a career of pulling back the curtain on the second Elizabethan era, from The Queen to The Crown. This isn’t even the first fictional version of Prince George: a short-lived animated series on HBO Max, The Prince, depicted George as a Machiavellian eight year old.
Tannahill doesn’t consume much of that content—or the sappy royal romances that surged after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex went public with their romance in 2016. “Generally speaking, this work is not for me,” he says, though he concedes that royal stories offer compelling ways “to explore themes of power and responsibility and family.”
He’s also aware of how the theme has entered queer media—for example, Casey McQuiston’s bestselling novel Red, White, and Royal Blue which paired a fictional British prince with the son of a U.S. president, and the Netflix series Young Royals, which followed a Swedish prince falling for another boy at boarding school. Lisa Ambjörn, a co-creator of Young Royals, says Sweden’s royal family felt almost like a technicality when she was young. “We were built on socialistic values,” she says. Nevertheless, she saw royalty as a useful framing device for a coming-of-age story. “Beyond the queer aspect, most teenagers feel like the world is watching,” says Ambjörn. “It doesn’t matter if that’s true or not, because that’s what you’re experiencing.”
McQuiston also saw royal life as a powerful narrative tool. The author only followed the royal family casually before writing Red, White, and Royal Blue, but reading the romance novel The Royal We left them interested in the family’s power dynamics. “Everyone sees everything you do,” they told SheReads, “but there’s a whole other story happening behind closed doors.”
Some royals have started to capitalize on public interest in their private lives. Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex have been at it since 2020, when they signed lucrative deals with Netflix and Spotify. (Their latest hit, With Love, Meghan, just dropped a second season.) Lord Ivar Mountbatten—the first openly gay member of Britain’s extended royal family—competed on The Traitors earlier this year. And later this fall, Princess Märtha Louise of Norway and her husband, the shaman Durek Verrett, will produce and star in a new documentary about their love story. But fiction still has a monopoly on the private lives of royals in line for the throne.
Speaking to T&C, Tannahill projected a practiced agnosticism about royalty, something close to McQuiston and Ambjörn’s detachment. But Prince Faggot is more provocative than Red, White, and Royal Blue or Young Royals, from the explicit title to the use of real people—and it’s also more political. Tannahill, who is Canadian, grew up as a subject of the British Commonwealth. In a 2020 essay about the viral photos of Prince George for Now Toronto, he wrote, “The monarchy is my enemy. Yet, I cannot help feel a kinship with this little royal fawn. It’s the same kinship I feel when I consider all queer children, […] a kind of sublime, tender protectiveness.”
Red, White & Royal Blue
The Royal We
Untold Story
That tension animates the play. In the first scene, cast members appear as performers about to put on a show and comment on the premise. Mihir Kumar, who later appears as George’s first serious lover, gives what Tannahill calls “a totally non-fiction account of my journey with that photograph.” K. Todd Freeman (later Prince William) critiques the other performers’ willingness to discuss a child’s sexuality. That framing device gives Tannahill’s play some guardrails: a mission statement for protecting all of its subjects.
The show builds towards an argument that its queer and trans performers need more protection than Prince George, who is insulated from speculation about his private life and protected from any real danger. That argument is presented most urgently in a blistering monologue about the true meaning of royalty delivered by N’yomi Allure Stewart, who plays several characters including Princess Charlotte. That speech, which closes the play, is inspired by an interview Tannahill conducted with Stewart. (The script calls all the other material “fictional,” though the performers helped shape it.)
Stewart is a fixture of New York City’s queer Ballroom community who earned the title “Princess of the Pier” for her performances at the Christopher Street Pier, where queer dancers have gathered since the 1970s. Stewart wears that title proudly. In her final monologue, she talks about the Black, trans icons who made her a princess. She explained the lineage to Town & Country: “I come from women who put themselves in danger to live in their truth so I could have surgery today and feel affirmed in my skin. I come from women who took care of children who couldn’t be taken care of by their blood family. I come from women who put their lives and their bodies in danger to hustle up some coin, to feed themselves and those kids.” In the end, Prince Faggot asks its audience to care about that kind of royalty.
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