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* Portraying Princess Diana
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‘The Crown’
* Portraying Princess Diana
* Showrunner Says Goodbye
* Who Plays Kate Middleton?
* Becoming Prince Harry
Credit...Tyler Comrie
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Critic’s Notebook
LEAVE THE POOR PRINCESS ALONE
Less than 30 years after her death, fictional reincarnations of Diana are
everywhere. But even icons deserve more time to rest in peace.
Credit...Tyler Comrie
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By Jesse Green
* Published Jan. 21, 2024Updated Jan. 22, 2024, 10:58 a.m. ET
There she is in her pink suit, pearl earrings and feathered shag.
There she is with her upcast eyes, unknowable sorrow and perfect sympathy.
There she is, that candle in the wind someone keeps relighting.
Though killed in a car crash in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, turns up
everywhere today, in plays, on television, in movies and even musicals. She’s
entertainment gold: the perfect combo of stardom, tragedy and unanswerability.
Which makes her, like a Dickens novel, public domain.
In the last two years alone, I’ve spent more time with her than I did in the 36
she was alive. I saw her in a play called “Casey and Diana,” produced by the
Stratford Festival in Ontario and now available to stream on Stratfest@Home. She
was a spectral presence Off Broadway in “Dodi & Diana,” a marital drama that
hijacked her story to lend oomph to its own.
The 2021 film “Spencer,” which I rewatched on Hulu over New Year’s, did much the
same thing, trying to wring some ichor of glamour out of her corpse. On
television, “The Crown” hung the breathless first half of its final season on
the buildup to the crash, blithely making stuff up where the record is thin.
(Netflix justified it as “fictional dramatization.”) And what can one say about
“Diana, the Musical,” which had a brief run on Broadway in 2021 (but an ongoing
one on Netflix), except that it, too, died in a disaster?
Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of
Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international
productions. More about Jesse Green
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 21, 2024, Section AR, Page 6
of the New York edition with the headline: Leave the Poor Princess Alone. Order
Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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