There are many good reasons Shakespeare was drawn to write about kings. A dramatist is always looking to combine the personal and the political, the intimate with the epic. And a king, with a literal body politic, does this innately.

Every moment of psychology, or flicker of fallibility, has implications for the country and, in return, the mood and politics of the country are reflected in the monarch’s anxieties. The currency is power and influence, symbolism and high stakes are everywhere you look, and yet the action remains grounded in the singular human being there on stage. There is pageantry, betrayals, births and tragic deaths. Playwrights are often seeking “great reckonings in little rooms” and with a monarch as your central character, this is all but guaranteed.

I had this in mind as I worked on my play, King Charles III, in 2013. It was written in a Shakespearean form, and set in the then near future, beginning the day of the Queen’s funeral. In Charles’s first few weeks as king, he discovers he can’t, in good conscience, sign a bill into law. This resistance causes huge political turmoil in the country, and in his family. I had begun the project with a sceptical, pre-formed view of the royals, and probably expected the tone to be more comic. But, in writing, the dramatist in me took over.

I found myself absorbed with what the psychology of Charles, Camilla, William and Harry would be without the Queen. And as I delved into their passions and frustrations, it gave me an answer to questions about the play I had been worrying about: don’t these figures get enough flak already? How much power do they really wield these days?

I discovered that the play was a warning. While the Queen was alive, she allowed the country a comforting illusion that could buffer against the fear of change. If people were ever concerned at how much was becoming unfamiliar, they would be reassured that the Queen was not. Yes, perhaps she seemed a little older each Christmas, with slightly different-shaped glasses, but essentially she was a fixed point, and – many people hoped – possibly immortal. As depicted in Peter Morgan’s The Crown, her overall narrative was one of benevolent, unyielding certainty and strength. She had seen off many challenges in her time – Suez, Thatcher, Diana, Prince Andrew – so why would death be any different? One of my intentions in writing the play was to remind us that this was, of course, a fantasy. The Queen would die one day soon, and how would we feel and react when it happened? How would it alter us, and our country? Would it expose the fact that the monarch had more power than we realised?

Yes, constitutionally, but just as important, power over our sense of identity. The heated controversies around Harry and Meghan, or the accuracy of The Crown, suggest this influence is lasting and real. A large number of people in Britain, if not the majority, care deeply. They hold the monarch and the monarchy as part of their very sense of self.

My play ends as a tragedy. Charles, refusing to sign the bill into law, causes uproar, and is deposed by William and Kate before his coronation. They are crowned instead and Charles becomes, as he puts it:

“- an old

Forgotten gardener, who potters round

And talks to plants, and chuckles to himself.”

William and Kate become a new, younger king and queen, promising to restore their late grandmother’s approach of passive stability. After a moment of potential radicalism, even revolution, the country quickly reverts to the conservative.

Today it’s clear this part of the play has not come literally true. William and Kate remain in-waiting. Charles is king. And while he may lack the kind of radicalism he displays in the play, he has shown a commitment to understanding between faiths, to working with less-privileged communities, to addressing the complexities of the Commonwealth, the importance of the environment, and through his troubled and – albeit unwilling – exposure of his private life, he has been revealed as a flawed, tormented but seemingly thoughtful man. Perhaps even those of us mistrustful of the monarchy can find some hope in the ceremony today, as least symbolically, for while the real-life Charles is unlikely to spark any kind of revolution himself, a huge number of young, and not so young, people are campaigning for change – fast.

Through an urgent desire for a new sense of social justice, fairness, and compassion they are rightly questioning much of the conservative thought that has sat under our notions of “stability” since the war. They crave a very different version of the British story to the one the Queen embodied.

So maybe this new king and new era present, along with fresh coins and stamps, an opportunity to reshape our national identity, to discover better answers to those questions, and to tell a more contemporary, complex and human version of our story.