‘Ladies of Versailles’ Tries to Have Its Cake and Eat It Too (Review)

I don’t blush easily as a person. While learning to do improv in college, the first thing they taught me was how to kill my prudery filter on command. Once that filter’s gone, it’s incredibly easy to hear, see, and speak the filthiest things in public. Nonetheless, with strong rum in my system and surrounded by people much more prone to embarrassment than myself, I can’t help but feel my cheeks flush as the Duchess of Polignac shares the latest libel with me, depicting her and Marie Antoinette in flagrante delicto.

But, of course, this is Versailles — such excesses are to be expected.

Ladies of Versailles is a Zoom show by Eat the Cake, where participants play guests of Versailles, indulging in the hobbies and pastimes of the 18th century French nobility. Eat the Cake provided three programs to select from, all of which took that premise in very different directions. For children and families, Marie Antoinette had cake (of course) and traditional French board games. For ladies, even though makeup was just as popular among the men of Versailles, the Duchess of Potin offered beauty tips over gossip in an interactive makeup tutorial. That left, for me, by process of elimination, an evening of sex talk, bawdy songs, and drinks with the Duchess of Polignac, though I most likely would have chosen this third option anyway. Histories of sex and liquor are always interesting to me but I’ll admit I would have preferred to feel less forced into the decision. (My experience, as such, may only reflect one facet of the show, but I can see implied similarities between the different tracks.)

The central challenge of the show is obvious: you are not at Versailles. You are in your home or apartment, sitting at your kitchen table or vanity mirror. Preparatory instructions do their absolute best to mitigate that truth to mixed effects. While certain pre-show “recipes” like recommended ingredients to prepare the afternoon’s signature aphrodisiac cocktail and a playlist of favorite music of Versailles did well to get me into the mood, other features were a bit more difficult, so I did justice to them as best I could.

While on the one hand I admire the ambition of creators Eat the Cake in instructing audience members to dress up in costume and try to decorate your Zoom frame, these tasks end up being quite arduous, especially since I lacked the opportunity or time to shop for the show. The best I could muster from my closet was a laced neck black shirt I usually wear to the Renaissance Faire. If I fell out of character or wandered out of the present moment, I felt a pang of guilt, followed by a moment of reflection. Was it my fault, for not being dressed up and having set the scene appropriately? Or were the ambitions a little too grand to expect me to be able to muster these things?

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Regarding the aphrodisiac cocktail recipe, I can happily report back its deliciousness. A spiced chocolate rum infusion, it made a perfect scene-setting cordial. Having reviewed the recipe for Marie Antoinette’s cake, a delicious looking raspberry financier, and the list of makeup needed for the fashion and gossip track, the Ladies of Versailles instructions seem mostly strong. They manage to balance tradition and historical accuracy with clarity and relative ease. That sort of specificity falls apart for costuming; participants in my session ranged from wearing t-shirts to donning full wigs and gowns, and the clash somewhat brought me out of the moment. A “dress for dinner” instruction would have allowed for anyone who wanted to do 1879 cosplay to do so while also keeping an immersion-preserving baseline.

(Minor spoilers follow.)

That difficulty in maintaining the setting became the central tension of the evening. When the Duchess spoke, it was a delight; I was very much in Versailles, following along to make my cocktail, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the intensely pornographic pamphlets of the 18th century she shared (libels, printed off shore as both pornography and anti-monarchist propaganda), and hearing her first-hand historical recollections of her affairs, peppered with cheeky denials of some of the era’s rumored scandals. We all giggled over our new royal titles. From now on, I will gladly answer to any who choose to address me as le Comte du Bethesda.

Then, the script would turn, and suddenly we’d be asked to sing a filthy song about an incestuous affair in the woods, or talk about our most scandalous and unusual trysts to the rest of the group. As I said earlier, for me, that’s usually simple. Even if I’m blushing a bit, that’s a good afternoon in my opinion. But one lesson I learned quickly in Ladies of Versailles though is that that sort of charming filth is only fun if everyone plays along at a similar level of freedom. The mixed levels of comfort, investment, and — in the case of one participant — lack of technical proficiency with Zoom made those segments uneven and jarring. Scene after scene, I found myself feeling “watched” by the others as one of the more active participants. I alone ended up offering a story of an outrageous love affair, a story from my college years where I learned (at a very inopportune moment) that my date was a hardcore masochist. If we were all oversharing together, it would have been a giggly, rum-fueled sleepover at Versailles; without an even level of bawdy participation, I felt like a braggy pervert, and vaguely judged.

None of this is necessarily the fault of Eat the Cake’s direct actions or instructions, but it’s the sort of circumstance I wish they had been prepared for when designing the interactive experience. The performance from the Duchess of Polignac (Elena Odessa Ray) was strong, and a lot of work was put into establishing immersion from home, but not enough work was put into ensuring that atmosphere was maintained once the audience got involved. I had a good time, learned a lot (although don’t ask me where I can use knowledge about Louis XVI’s foreskin in the future) and I look on my time at Versailles fondly, but I feel a bit let down. If the event had been, say, pre-recorded with opportunities to play along (in the style of a combination Youtube tutorial and video essay), along with the suggested scene setting, I would have probably enjoyed it more and, counterintuitively, felt more immersed. I have full confidence in Eat the Cake’s in-person production, a fully costumed event in Paris. Online, though, it’s not quite the opulence I was seeking.

At the end of the day, I have to applaud the ambition of Ladies of Versailles. The difficulty of trying to establish not just this scenario, but the setting of Versailles via Zoom cannot be overstated. Even though those ambitions weren’t fully actualized, I enjoyed the salacious charm of it all. Still, I will most likely be delaying my return to Versailles until I can visit, ahem, in the flesh. At the end of the day, it’s ultimately unsurprising that sex turns out to be better in person, even if you’re just talking about it.

Ladies of Versailles has concluded.

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