Will the real Her Majesty please stand up?

We can admire the psychology of The Crown while knowing Olivia Colman’s Queen is invented.

The royal soap opera is back. No, not the Prince Andrew thing but series three of The Crown, which became available on Netflix at the weekend. The acting of the major parts is once again outstanding. Although some viewers are struggling with the change of cast, Olivia Colman’s magnificent performance conveys with total plausibility the Queen’s imagined stiffness and loneliness, her chilliness and stifled emotion.

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It is, however, jarring to find in the series details that are obviously inaccurate, fanciful or sensationalised. The claim that Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures who was eventually outed as a KGB spy, blackmailed Prince Philip by threatening to reveal his alleged involvement in the Profumo scandal is invention.

Olivia Colman portrays Queen Elizabeth II in a scene from the third season of The Crown on Netflix. Picture: Netflix

Princess Margaret’s filthy limerick contest with the US president Lyndon Johnson is invention. The suggestion that her White House visit in 1965, which actually happened, was responsible for America granting Britain a crucial financial bailout is invention too.

Despite these and other false notes the series provides mesmerising drama, and one particular historical event is depicted with devastating fidelity. The recreation of the unspeakable tragedy at Aberfan in 1966, when a massive coal tip crashed down on a Welsh pit village engulfing a primary school and killing 116 children and 28 adults, is shattering and deeply upsetting.

Many of the apparent psychological insights into the royal family’s principal players are convincing. Yet these pose a persistent question: are they fact or fiction? The Crown’s writer Peter Morgan has said: “I try to make everything as truthful as possible even if I can’t know it’s entirely accurate.”

He takes a historical event, researches it thoroughly to provide essential authenticity and then laces it with his own invention to illustrate what he believes is a fundamental psychological or historical truth.

The Queen and Prince Philip are presented as complex characters full of doubts and insecurities. The Queen despairs of her own dullness compared to her dazzling sister Margaret. Prince Philip tells her brutally that the House of Windsor has always contained the dull and dutiful alongside the dazzling and dangerous. But this is just Morgan giving us a homily about the meaning of monarchy that he has created in his own head.

Reportedly, the Queen’s greatest regret is that she did not visit Aberfan until eight days after the disaster. Families from the village, however, have recently spoken of their gratitude to her for the sympathy she did show them.

Morgan has drawn criticism for depicting her, when she finally visits the stricken community, dabbing her eye with a handkerchief and then irritably saying no one noticed her eye was in fact bone-dry. Yet he also shows her shedding a real tear over the tragedy in private.

This is his invention to illustrate the Queen’s buried emotions. He has remarked that “our idealised, emotional memory shapes all history”. But the series represents Morgan’s truth, Morgan’s history, Morgan’s royal family.

Olivia Colman plays Queen Elizabeth 11 in the Netflix drama (3rd season), The Crown. Picture: Netflix

Referring to two popular TV drama shows, he has said: “I look at The Sopranos or Succession and think, they are just different versions of what we are doing.” That sounds like a distasteful justification for taking liberties with the facts.

And yet monarchy is an idea in each of our own heads. We project upon its leading players our fantasies of their characters. We constantly invent and reinvent monarchy in our collective national image.

Moreover, the actual dramas of the lesser royals appear to demonstrate life exceeding the implausibility of art. Prince Andrew’s car-crash TV interview, designed to shut down questions about his wildly inappropriate friendship with the predatory sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, succeeded instead in making the prince appear to be living within his own fictional universe. Despite the wall-to-wall incredulity and condemnation over his excruciatingly ill-judged remarks, he reportedly thinks the interview was a success. One line in it was particularly telling when he said: “Choosing to get out there and talk about these things, it’s almost a mental health issue, to some extent, for me.”

Portraying their gilded selves as victims of circumstances which somehow have nothing to do with their own behaviour has become a defining feature of that other soap opera, the resentful and self-pitying behaviour of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. As Pirandello might have written of the Sussexes and the Duke of York, here are three characters in search of a role.

Faced with these drama queens in her own family, the Queen of course says nothing. Given her example of stoical duty, not to mention her concern for the future of the monarchy itself, we can all imagine what she must be going through as she watches this unedifying spectacle turn a drama into a crisis.

But when we do so, how many of us will now see in our mind’s eye not Her Majesty but the face of Olivia Colman’s Queen - upon which are being projected the thoughts and feelings that we are so curious to discover, and which both this wonderful actress and the dramatist who has written her lines are imprinting on our minds as reality.

To adapt Orwell’s final words in Animal Farm, we look from royal to actor and from actor to royal and from royal to actor again; but already it’s impossible to say which is which.

The Times