Springtime for Princess Diana

SPRINGTIME for Diana and Germany. The Mail reports that Princess Diana has been turned into a stage show.

Produced by German director Christoph Schlingensief (United Trash – a comedy about German soldiers in Africa) and Das Deutsche Kettensägen Massaker (The German Chainsaw Massacre), the production is due to arrive on the London stage in October.

“The Diana piece completes my series which started with Hitler, says Christoph. (Christoph created the movie 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler – Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker (100 years of Adolf Hitler – the last hour in the Führerbunker).) “They are all people around whom mythologies are built up”, he adds.

A provocateur my design, and a producer of adolescent vauderville by accident, Schlingensief makes a decent point. But he is wrong. Diana is not myth. Diana is a dossier.

And while a woman dressed as Her Majesty the Queen gives a Nazi salute in Schlingensief’s work, the dossier we call The Daily Express focuses on Diana’s “summer of love”.

While Schlingensief’s Diana is confused, the Express’s Dossier tells how “in the last months of her life, [Diana] enjoyed fun and frolics in the sun and fell head over heels for Dodi Fayed”. It is certain of this.

She was “relaxed”. These were “carefree days”. She was “having the time of her life”. She told the press pack in St Tropez: “You’re going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do.”

What could she have meant? Was Diana about to dye her hair, change her bikini, refuse to shave her armpits? We don’t get to hear, and are left wondering if our guess about the armpits was correct.

But things were not to last. “Diana’s summer of love was ending. But a still unfinished winter of discontent was about to begin in the most world-shattering fashion.”

Mit a bing-bang bing-bang boom…

Posted: 1st, September 2006 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink