PTE drama Serving Elizabeth brings Kenyan perspectives to The Crown’s royal visit

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This article was published 11/11/2025 (324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes, Reena Jolly feels like an impostor.

It’s a common thinking trap for workers in creative fields — that they’ve arrived at a gig through a lucky draw or by some sort of mistake. So when she was cast last year as a would-be bank robber alongside Bob Odenkirk, Henry Winkler and Lena Headey in the locally shot flick Normal — set for an April 2026 theatrical release — Jolly had to remind herself from Day 1 that she belonged on the starry set.

“I was suddenly in an action movie where I’m shooting guns. I’ve never held a gun before. I’ve never stabbed anyone before,” Jolly says with a laugh.

The 29-year-old graduate of Montreal’s National Theatre School says she had to let go, remind herself of how confident and sure of herself she is on a theatre stage and bring that same energy to the set.

“And once I made that decision, once I realized I was cast for a reason, I made the most of it. Whether I want to or not, millions of people are going to see my performance, so I might as well accept it, add it to the resumé and be proud of what I’ve done,” she says.

Impostor syndrome never even occurs to Tia, one of two characters played by Jolly in Serving Elizabeth, the second production of the Prairie Theatre Exchange season, opening today on the Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage.

A film-school graduate who has been hired as a production intern at a prestige television show about the Royal Family, Tia is an aspiring writer and showrunner with network-shaping ambitions.

“She’s very confident and sure about herself. She just wants to make things shake,” Jolly says.

When she reads a script for an episode set in Kenya, Tia notes the absence of Black voices and characters, which introduces a parallel timeline, in 1952, wherein Jolly plays Faith, the idealistic daughter of a Kenyan caterer (Bola Aiyeola-Owens) preparing for the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh and the future queen.

Tia is a partial stand-in for playwright Marcia Johnson, who was inspired to write the script after seeing the second episode of the first season of Netflix’s The Crown, titled Hyde Park Corner.

“I had been disappointed that that episode … about the royal visit to Kenya, did not give meaningful speaking roles to Black actors,” Johnson said in an interview in February 2020.

Johnson, who is based in Toronto, pitched a “redress” of that to Ontario’s Thousand Islands Playhouse Playwrights Unit as a response to the company’s call for scripts addressing the impacts of colonialism.

Like Tia, Johnson felt the fictionalized depiction of the royal visit needed revisiting, along with a fresh injection of Kenyan realities, such as references to the Mau Mau rebellion, in which an insurgent group rose up against British colonial rule.

That was in 2017, and in the eight years since, Serving Elizabeth — which reframes the royal visit to bring local perspectives to the forefront — has become Johnson’s most produced play, including a run at the Stratford Festival in 2021.

For Jolly, whose most recent stage roles include the seductive Miss Scarlet in Clue and as actress Millie Davis in Trouble in Mind — both staged by Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2023 — the greatest thrill offered by Johnson’s script was the opportunity to play two characters from different backgrounds contending with parallel constraints when it comes to sharing their voices.

“It’s really a play about sisterhood, shared womanhood and solidarity between Black women,” says Jolly, who reunites with Trouble in Mind director Cherissa Richards, who helms Serving Elizabeth.

“It’s about who gets to tell the story.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca