Kay Mellor clearly knows the world of the TV soap very well indeed. She should: she's written enough real ones.

Her current creation is Castle Grove, a perfectly dreadful, though fortunately fictional, serial set in a north that bears more than a passing resemblance to Weatherfield and Beckindale.

Kay has created for herself the character of Susan Heaven, a brassy actress who for 18 years has been the rock around which the Castle Grove characters revolve.

By the end of this funny and frighteningly well-observed one-woman performance, we know Susan almost as well as she knows herself. She has, we discover, been married five times ("two dead, two divorced and one bigamist") and fallen victim to more crises than the cast of Crossroads put together. Her life is no less tempestuous off-screen.

She is a star but she has acquired none of the airs and graces of stardom. She dislikes her fellow actors and spits contempt at her directors.

She does, however, find a sort of sisterhood in Princess Diana, on the week of whose death the play is set. The two of them, she says, possessed the power to move ordinary people; they could see reality through the phoniness.

Anyone dropping in to the Playhouse from the set of Emmerdale, say, will find much here that is familiar, yet Queen is not a satire on soap. Rather, it is a deep and affecting character study, much as we have come to expect of Kay since Band of Gold and A Passionate Woman. This time, however, she distinguishes herself not only as a writer but also as a performer.

David Behrens

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