The Ethics of Royal Speculation: Jordan Tannahill’s ‘Prince Faggot’

As last month’s ‘No Kings’ protests across the US demonstrate, the spectre of the monarchy is difficult to displace in the public imagination, even for a country that has been without one for 249 years. He is a useful whipping post because, unlike an autocrat or an oligarch, his divinely vested power bears no trace of the populism that might raise thornier, self-incriminating questions about the relationship between subject and ruler. So, it comes as no surprise that the possibility of a future gay king of England proved to be an irresistible subject for Jordan Tannahill, whose Prince Faggot (2025) begins with an atonement of sorts for focusing yet another story on the private lives of the royal family.  

Six actors, perched on the edge of the stage as versions of themselves, discuss the ethics of speculating on the burgeoning sexuality of Prince George, whose demure expression in a photograph sparked a similar debate in 2017. Since this is exactly what the play sets out to do, their conversation has the heavy-handed feel of an argument you have in your head – a self-consciousness that the play never fully sheds as it guiltily indulges in the familiar rhythms of palace intrigue. Yet, only once these metatextual elements evolve into displays of vulnerability and transparency – the actors show their own childhood photos and frequently disrupt the plot to share stories from their lives – does a compelling counternarrative begin to emerge. 

George is home from college on break, eager to introduce his family to his new boyfriend, Dev, who is older and of British Indian heritage. This George is power-curious, if not especially power-hungry, speaking admiringly of civic duty while also not pushing back too hard on Dev’s withering anti-royalist sentiments. Like all kings, though, he has two bodies: the physical (he is a ‘chaotic bottom’ with a taste for bondage) and the ‘body politic’, the symbolic crown whose significance weighs heavily on him. When photos of the couple leak to the press, the prince naively expresses that the march of liberal progress has dulled his future subjects’ bigotry enough that they will accept a gay king and that his two selves can be reconciled.

It is Dev who is tasked with demonstrating, through a familiar blend of campus-born critical theory, that such a unification is impossible, that the blood of empire cannot, in effect, be pinkwashed. Dev informs George, post-coitus, that his unmatched privilege denies him the honour of ever counting himself among the real faggots. Tannahill is positing a conception of queerness bifurcated between materialism and romanticism: one side born of marginalization and pain, the other a construct of the bourgeoisie that ‘has always been permissible within the halls of power’. The play’s conception of the former is never fully explicated, although it seems to derive from the same accident of birth that furnishes the divine right of kings – that is to say, something just as immovable. 

Unfortunately, Dev’s moral clarity does not leave him much room to grow. It is just as possible to strip a character of his agency through infallibility as it is through helplessness. And aside from a well-timed quip about his Equinox membership, Dev’s beliefs are afforded too much reverence to be challenged. He is so obstinate that it is impossible to understand why he endured three years of a relationship that insults the very foundation of his political life. While George’s inner desires are at least shown to be somewhat in opposition to the increased proficiency with which he wields his authority, Dev’s sexuality and ideology are coterminous and therefore flat. We are told all the reasons why he shouldn’t be in this relationship – the death threats, microaggressions and George’s general petulance – but never what made him fall in love or how he might be seduced by this proximity to power. When late in the play the pair shares a rain-soaked reunion, it is genuinely surprising to hear that Dev carries a torch for George – a capitulation to the very genre conventions that the production claims to scorn, right down to the abdication ultimatum that feels designed to entice a viewer to breathlessly hit ‘Next Episode’. The tragedy of Prince Faggot can either be that class difference ultimately thwarts true love or that it makes it impossible altogether; the play wants it both ways and as a result loses some of its power. Some, but not all.  

If, like Dev, Prince Faggot has some hangups about its fascination with the physical embodiment of imperialism, it deploys the metatextual elements that sketch out its notion of oppositional queerness with far greater confidence. Rarely has a company of actors seemed so joyful performing together or so transparent about the interplay between themselves and their characters. Self-empowerment is a frequent coda in queer narratives but one that need not be a cliché, not when so many perspectives are allowed to share the same space. It is only when the narrative is forced to demonstrate its politics that the play falls short on both fronts. It speaks movingly of the liberatory potential of fetish play but misunderstands the dialectic of lordship and bondage as a unidirectional power dynamic. It is far more comfortable in its ideas about the king’s physical body than it is about any form of symbolism that transcends it. So, it looks away from the abyss to somewhere more familiar, if no less affecting. It may be morally right that the faggots find their contentment with community and self, that they don’t sign deals with the Devil, but for a play that gets so close to answering the question of what if they did, it doesn’t have the temerity to seize the throne.

Prince Faggot is on showing at Playwrights Horizons, New York, until 27 July.

^{Main image: John McCrea as Prince George; Mihir Kumar as Dev Chatterjee in Prince Faggot (detail), 2025. Photograph: Marc J. Franklin}