THEATRE / We are amused: Paul Taylor on The Queen and I, Sue Townsend's vision of the Royal Family on the dole

Her Majesty's 'annus horribilis' was a bed of roses compared with what Sue Townsend dreamt up for her in The Queen and I, a novel in which a newly elected Republican government despatches the Royal Family to live in poverty on a Midlands council estate. The author has adapted this excellent bestseller for the stage, and it is now on tour as the first venture of Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint company.

In that it views the lives of the poor through the eyes of drastically reduced royalty, the piece is like a blackly comic King Lear - except that the Queen is a sane, have-a-go Lear in a world where you'd need to be a member of Mensa to understand the benefit forms.

In the book, the Queen's appearance goes to seed, and she notices how this affects people's attitude towards her. It's a visual joke in the stage adaptation that no matter how low she sinks - scrabbling for vegetables on the market pavement, queueing at the DSS - Pam Ferris's sublimely funny and sympathetic incarnation of the Queen remains perfectly coiffed, clad in a kilt and inseparable from her handbag.

You could argue, though, that this blunts the political point, as does the failure of the stage version to keep tabs on the doings of the radical government. The absence of cheque-book-waving journalists adds to the feeling that, in this dramatic treatment, the public implications of the fantasy have been ignored.

By way of compensation, there are one or two hilarious sequences where theatricality turns up trumps, as it does when the Queen, the Queen Mother and Diana attend a drama therapy workshop with some of the other women on the estate. Ferris gives you a wonderful sense of a rather lonely, isolated woman (still consoled by visits from the ghost of her Scottish nanny), for whom being pitched into poverty and exposed to working class intimacy is rather a liberating adventure.

Around her, in the finest Royal Court Eighties style, the rest of the cast engage in some highly skilled doubling. All strangulated decency in a blazer, Toby Salaman is perfection as Prince Charles and convinces, too, as a salt-of- the-earth video salesman. Straddling a vast social divide, Carole Hayman turns up both as Violet, a gutsy graduate from the school of hard knocks, and as Princess Margaret, whose incurable snootiness is surrounded by a miasma of fag smoke.

Sometimes the humour is gratuitously unkind. It's genuinely funny that, to keep herself in booze, Margaret becomes a hard-nosed money lender; and it humanises the portrait to show how pleased she is that she has at long last come out of the Queen's shadow. On the other hand, it seems cheap when she tells the impecunious Diana that 'given your suicidal tendencies, I consider this a high risk loan'.

Well worth seeing for the performances, the piece hasn't yet found its ideal form. The chorus-like Posse of Lost Boys doesn't work, and as for the tritely right-on songs by Mickey Gallagher and Ian Dury, well, having the Queen lend her voice to these constitutes the only clear case of lese-majeste.

Runs until 16 April at the Leicester Haymarket, then on tour (Details: 0533 539797)