‘Yes’, says the King, ‘I have always been myself … Only now I seem myself … I have remembered how to seem.’

The King is then rushed off to Westminster to be shown to the MPs, who, still under the impression that he is mad, are busy passing the Regency Bill. They rush out to greet him and he addresses them, haltingly at first but with increasing confidence, muttering to the pages at the finish, ‘How’s that, lads? Not bad, eh?’ – i.e., the performance has gone well; he has remembered how to seem.

Finally, as the Royal Family go up the steps of St Paul’s for the Thanksgiving Service at the close of the film, the King urges his family to smile and wave and pretend to be happy, because that is their job. These scenes would, I hope, have rung a bell with the late Ervin Goffmann, the American sociologist whose analysis of the presentation of self and its breakdown in the twentieth century seems just as appropriate to this deranged monarch from the eighteenth century.

The Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s did not have to be invented; it’s a nice conclusion to the King’s illness and needed no departure from historical truth. Beginning my career as a historian, I find it harder to take liberties with the truth than someone whose upbringing has been less factually inhibited. I have to be forced into departures from history by the exigencies of the drama, the insistence of the director and sheer desperation. Had Nicholas Hytner at the outset suggested bringing the King from Kew to Westminster to confront the MPs, I would have been outraged at this adjustment to what had actually happened. By the time I was plodding through the third draft I would have taken the King to Blackpool if I thought it would have helped.

Alan Bennett, 1995

CAST AND CREDITS

The Madness of King George was released in December 1994. The cast was as follows: