Disgust at play showing Princess Diana in bed with Down's Syndrome men

Disgust at play showing Princess Diana in bed with Down's Syndrome men
Theatregoers in the German capital Berlin walked out of a controversial play about Princess Diana that showed her in bed with two Down's Syndrome men while the Queen was portrayed by a circus dwarf.

"Good job that I hadn’t eaten beforehand because otherwise I would have thrown up," wrote one theatre critic after watching the opening night of the play at the Volksbuehne Theatre.

The bizarre drama, which is due to come to London next month, premiered on Wednesday night and dozens of people walked out on it within minutes of the curtain going up.

Entitled Kaprow City – no-one quite knows why – German society girl Jenny Elvers played Diana on a stage that only one third of the audience could see. The other two thirds watched the action on TV monitors in black and white.

Christoph Schlingensief, the director, laid on an avant-garde production that had no plot and made little sense.

Those who stayed for the full two hours, culminating in Diana being wrapped in plastic when she died, gave it only desultory applause.

Schlingensief plans to bring it to the London Frieze Art Fair next month under the name "The Last Hour of Lady Diana."

A film version will be released next August to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Diana's death. "I have very interesting information that she really died in London, not in Paris, and reconstruct this new truth," Schlingensief said before the curtain went up.

"It can probably never be exactly clarified what happened in that hour of her death. Art has the freedom to interpret this."

Just why Diana was in bed with two Down's Syndrome men, or why an actor shaved his pubic hair on stage – or indeed who he was meant to portray – was never made clear.

Several people left their seats after an actress portraying Camilla had blood thrown on her.

"It lasted two hours and felt like 24," wrote the critic for the tabloid B.Z. "I simply didn’t understand a single thing about it," said Joerg Hoffmanm, who left after 12 minutes.