A Moving Blog

Occasional celluloid musings from BarryG

Sunday 19 December 2010

Devil's whore

Andrea Riseborough has been on a lucky casting streak recently. On TV in 2008, she played the young Margaret Thatcher deliciously well. In 2010, Never Let Me Go, Made in Dagenham and Brighton Rock have given her a trio of British movie successes. In between, she'd collected two Best Actress awards for her title role in The Devil's Whore, a flamboyant BBC TV four-part drama series set in Civil War times.


"Describe in 200 minutes the Civil War period (1642-1660) in terms of interesting politico-religious groups, a sexy and wilful young woman, the beheading of a king and subjugation of brave women and the noble Irish people", is the assignment apparently given himself by Peter Flannery, the saga's screenwriter and experienced British TV writer (co-awardee for Our Friends in the North in 1996 and most recently the creator/producer of Inspector George Gently).

He added: "Do so without focusing negative attention on anti-Catholicism, class warfare, Puritanism, squalor, Scotland and all the hundreds of characters involved in England history's bloodiest period." What TV audiences ended up with was typically well-constructed BBC period piece, an above-average well-acted historical strip-tease with a fictional central character and a few warped historical strands. Fun to look at; nothing to believe.

Riseborough revels in the role of Angelica Fanshawe, the impossibly (for the 17th Century) precocious girl who marries her childhood friend, the son of a minor rural lord. They both know and adore their nicely mannered king, Charles I (Peter Capaldi, The Thick of It), though Angelica does talk much out of her social and sexual standing in society.

Civil War breaks out when the king is challenged by Parliament, and Angelica is widowed when the king orders her husband's execution for surrendering his lands to the rebel army. This is led by handsome Oliver Cromwell (Dominic The Wire West), a nicely mannered farmer, and even more handsome Thomas Rainsborough (Michael Centurion Fassbender), who knew and soon knoweth Angelica.

Watching from the wings from the very start has been Thomas Sexby (John Life on Mars Simm), a gloomy facially-gashed soldier returned from German wars and employed as Angelica's protector, which labour of sword-fighting love becomes unpaid self-employment when her second husband is assassinated. For fictional reasons hard to explain in terms of any history, the plot frequently brings Angelica into the lives of rabble-rousing republican preacher Honest John Lilburne (Tom Goodman-Hill, chewing scenery and laughing badly) and his sanctimoniously valiant wife.

Angelica, initially a loyal royalist, had become a "Leveller" with her second husband. She agrees to a marriage of convenience with Sexby so that she can return to the land become a "Digger" and, in due dramatic course, a "Ranter", while her third husband has been unwillingly helping Cromwell to batter the Irish into submission without any scenes mentioning Roman Catholicism.

She is set up to be betrayed by a false Ranter by a vindictive merchant who had acquired her ancestral lands, whom she must kill after her third husband returned from Ireland just in time to disembowel the Ranter and get set up to be betrayed himself during an assassination attempt on Cromwell. Angelica, widowed a third time, is with child from her one night of passion with Sexby, and her story ends with at home with a daughter in a land with a new king.

TV drama director Marc Munden (Vanity Fair) keeps the actors and action moving speedily through colourfully well-lit glamorous and humble settings packed with extras. The background music is irritating, but less so than the over-used computer-generated skyscapes of scudding ominous clouds. They are nagging reminders that this historical drama is a fantastical cartoon.

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