Based on the true story of Marion Crawford, nanny to the royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, Melanie Tait’s tartly funny three-hander explores ideas of colonisation – not of land or peoples, in this case, but of one woman’s life and hopes.

Crawford’s story has been told before – novelised by Tessa Arlen in In Royal Service to the Queen and also in a Channel 4 documentary made some 20 years ago – but The Queen’s Nanny is, as far as I can tell, the first time it has been taken to the stage. Tait’s tartly funny and inventive version might not please the most ardent monarchists, but she’s written it with skill and a winning wit.

Emma Palmer, Elizabeth Blackmore and Matthew Backer in The Queen’s Nanny. Photo © Phil Erbacher

Introduced via an Australian journalist writing for a British tabloid, Marion is “a lonely old Scottish lady in an endless purgatory of tea-parties no-one shows up to.” Flashing back to 1931, Tait (The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race; A Broadcast Coup – both staged here at the Ensemble) shows us how her situation came to be, and who her...