Royal Watch News

Queen Elizabeth's image banned from play

Nov 12, 2012, 16:21 GMT

Queen Elizabeth

Buckingham Palace have refused Queen Elizabeth's image to be used on the adverts for a play about her.

Dame Helen Mirren - who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the long-serving royal in 'The Queen' - is once again playing her in a new West End production, 'The Audience', a new work based on the queen's weekly meetings with her prime ministers.

And while the play is believed to portray the 86-year-old monarch in a positive light, courtiers have objected to her image being used for the production.

Matthew Byam Shaw, one of the play's producers, said: 'We wanted to use an image that shows what an amazing constant the queen has been amid so much change during her reign - an image that represented all the tradition of the second Elizabethan age, and the queen's figurehead did that perfectly.

'I was baffled when they said we couldn't use the queen's image, particularly as we are not wanting to use it in a defamatory or negative way - quite the opposite. It is censorship.'

So the image has been modified to replace the queen's features with those of Helen.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: 'We ask companies not to use the queen's image in their advertising or promotional material. We felt the use of the queen's portrait for this play breached this code and suggested they might like to use a different image. It had nothing to do with the play itself.'