Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Films, History

Film Review: The Favourite (15)

REVIEW

THE FAVOURITE, set in the corrupt and debauched court of England’s Queen Anne during the 18th century, played magnificently by Olivia Colman, is an absolute hoot. The War of the Spanish Succession is also raging on the Continent.

Colman will soon be appearing as Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series The Crown, but it’s safe to say that this regal outing doesn’t give us much of a preview in what’s to come.

Her Anne character here bears more resemblance to another Elizabeth: Miranda Richardson’s Queenie in the TV sitcom Blackadder. She is childlike, prone to taking tantrums, full of self-pity, and in need of constant nursing at the hands of her lifelong but infinitely more glamorous and capable friend, Sarah Churchill, acting the part of the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz).

At the start of the film, Anne shows Sarah a model of the fabulous palace she is gifting her and her husband, the Duke (Mark Gatiss), to mark the famous victory at the Battle of Blenheim. But as Sarah points out, that victory didn’t actually end the war:

“Oh, I did not know that,” replies the Queen, who is not only dim, but also crippled with gout, overweight and given to eating until she makes herself sick. Her courtiers might flatter her absurdly, but the camera says something quite different. Colman, hobbling along the corridors of her palace, gives an uproarious and decidedly un-vain performance. The palace itself is Hatfield House in Hertfordshire.

Weisz similarly delivers an excellent performance. She plays Sarah which at times is almost like the thigh-slapping principal boy in a panto. Both are matched by an ambitious and conniving servant, Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), who inveigles her way first into Sarah’s affections, then into the Queen’s.

Hill has an impeccable English accent, connected to her lineage from an aristocratic family. Indeed, her father was Sarah’s cousin; yet, he was also irredeemably feckless.

“When I was 15 my father lost me in a card game,” says Abigail, so matter-of-factly. Sarah condescendingly tosses her a job as a kitchen maid. However, Abigail has not arrived at court to scrub floors and wash dishes. When she uses her foraging skills to make a herbal treatment for the Queen’s gout, she begins her inexorable rise in the court hierarchy.

She then discovers that there is a very secret dimension to the relationship between Sarah and the Queen, who even have pet names, Mrs Freeman and Mrs Morley, for each other.

How can she use this knowledge to her advantage? By this stage it should have occurred to the audience that the film’s title might not refer to Weisz’s calculating Duchess, but to Stone’s social-climbing servant.

Despite this Sarah will still take some supplanting as the power behind the throne. She is politically astute, a vital ally to the Prime Minister (James Smith), as he seeks to raise taxes to subsidise the war effort, which is being led in the field by her heroic husband. Her sworn enemy is the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult), who hopes to outflank Sarah by recruiting Abigail as a spy.

Handily, his protégé Colonel Masham (Joe Alwyn) fancies Abigail rotten. “Have you come to seduce me or rape me?” she asks, as he slips into her room one night. With an indignant reply, Masham replies: “I am a gentleman.”

“So, rape then,” she mutters. Repeatedly, the women in this film get the better of the men. All the bawdiness – and the language gets extremely salty at times – would be entertaining enough, but it is given a raucous spin by director Yorgos Lanthimos, working from a very comical and original screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara.

In one marvellous scene, he has a ball – quite literally with the baroque fashions of the time – with all those teetering wigs, powdered cheeks and fake beauty spots. The Greek director can hardly be accused of making ordinary films. His last two screen pictures, 2015s The Lobster (which again featured both Weisz and Colman) and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer in 2017, lurched between the whimsical and the downright weird.

The Favourite contains plenty of whimsy, too. But, without doubt, it is comfortably his best yet; Lanthimos has a director’s eye for the grotesque that suits overt comedy even better than it does for quirky horror. He is aided here by a droll chamber-music score, and by Robbie Ryan’s clever artistry and cinematography – which, sometimes, makes use of a wide-angle lens to wreak further distortion on the film’s twisted characters. The framework of the story, though, is entirely factual. Abigail Masham, as she later became, really did topple Sarah Churchill as the Queen’s favourite, if not perhaps as ruthlessly as she does here. But with hilarious audacity, Lanthimos along with his fellow screenwriters also sprinkle the story with anachronisms, including a dance that is more Saturday Night Fever than House of Stuart, and all sorts of modern-day idioms.

There is also great poignancy beneath all the fun. Abigail finds a way to Anne’s heart partly by playing with the 17 rabbits the Queen keeps in her bedchamber as substitutes for the 17 children she has lost. A later act of callous cruelty reminds us, however, that Abigail does not have her sovereign’s best interests at heart. In fact, she barely has a heart at all.

The Duchess, for all her machinations, genuinely does. This is a film which, at its own heart, is about friendship – both real and faked. A superb film that comes with the highest recommendation.

Verdict: A regal treat of historical fact.

★★★★★

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Arts, Books, Literature

Recommended Biographies…

SUMMARIES

. Robert Graves by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (published by Bloomsbury for £25, 480pp)

ALONG with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves was one of the great poets of the First World War. Graves was born in 1895 and when war broke out a week after he left school, he enlisted aged 19.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson describes his troubled schooldays at Charterhouse and the horror of the war, during which he was wounded and reported dead. He survived, and, whilst he was haunted by his experiences, married 18-year-old feminist artist Nancy Nicolson.

The first volume of Moorcroft Wilson’s finely researched biography concludes with the scandalous end of Graves’s marriage, when he and American poet Laura Riding – who had been conducting a turbulent, four-sided relationship with Nancy and Riding’s married lover – threw themselves out of the upstairs windows of their Hammersmith house.

. Becoming by Michelle Obama (published by Viking for £25, 448pp)

FOR most of us, making a toasted cheese sandwich would be almost the least exotic thing we could do. But for Michelle Obama, after eight years in the White House, sitting in the garden of her own house and eating toasted cheese felt like “my new life just beginning to announce itself . . . Here I am, in this new place”, she writes in the preface to her autobiography, “with a lot I want to say”.

Born into a working-class family in Chicago, she studied at Princeton and became a lawyer at a prestigious Chicago law firm, where she mentored a geeky summer associate named Barack Obama. When they bought ice-cream cones one summer evening and kissed for the first time, Michelle had no idea of the destiny that would one day find her bonding with the Queen over their uncomfortable shoes.

Warm-hearted, funny, passionate about social justice and movingly candid about the problems of being a politician’s wife, Becoming is as compulsive to read as a great novel.

. On Leopard Rock by Wilbur Smith (published by Zaffre for £20, 368pp)

FROM his early childhood years and onwards, Wilbur Smith’s twin passions have been hunting and writing. The secret of both, he observes, is tenacity. Smith was born in 1933, in what is now Zambia, to parents who would inspire his future career in different ways. His father, Herbert, was obsessed with hunting (when Wilbur was a child, Herbert shot three man-eating lions), while his mother, Elfreda, was a passionate reader. Shelves of books lined the walls of their ranch house, and every night she would read to Wilbur in bed.

Soon he was determined to become a writer himself, an idea that his father vigorously opposed: “You’ll starve to death,” he predicted.

Uninhibited by the political correctness he detests, Smith’s memoir is a rollicking yarn of slaughtered wildlife, literary superstardom and late-blooming love. “I won’t stop writing until I stop breathing,” he promises.

. Not The Whole Truth by Angela Huth (published by Constable for £20, 320pp)

“SUDDENLY I am old”, writes the journalist and novelist Angela Huth, author of Land Girls. She was born in 1938, the daughter of the director and producer Harold Huth and his wife, Bridget. While Angela adored her father, her mother was “bored stiff by small children”, leaving Angela and her sister to be looked after by a devoted Nanny, who did her best to conceal their mother’s penchant for gin: “Oh dear, poor mummy fell down the stairs last night.”

Haphazardly educated at a girls’ boarding school, Angela studied art in Paris and Italy before returning “to face the dotty business of becoming a debutante”. A longing to write led her to Queen Magazine, where she met the brilliant journalist Quentin Crewe, who would become her first husband. There ensued an intensely glamorous Bohemian social life, with friends including David Frost and Princess Margaret, who shared Huth’s unusual phobia about dolls.

Deliciously gossipy and trenchant, Not The Whole Story is an entertaining collection of stories from times past.

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Arts, History, Literature, Theatre

Theatre: The Convert

REVIEW

COLONIALISM is undoubtedly one of the most vexed issues of modern times. If you throw God into the mix, things can really be stirred up.

But what many theatre goers will love about Danai Gurira’s dramatical play, set during the 1890s in what is now Zimbabwe, is that in the end it also achieves something transcendental.

First seen in America in 2012, Gurira’s story is about a young black Catholic called Chilford who saves a young woman from an arranged marriage.

The girl is the niece of his maid, who secretly practices the traditional religion of her Shona tribe.

Outside their home, trouble is brewing, with attacks on black collaborators known as “bafu” (meaning “traitor” in Shona). After a fatal scuffle, the girl is forced to choose between her people and her Catholic faith.

The big – and some critics may say ultimate – question posed by Gurira’s compelling and intense play is expressed by the maid: “What is wrong with our ways?”

It’s a subject that goes to the heart of our understanding of cultural identity, economic development and whether one way of life can ever be set above another.

The language is uncompromising, with the missionary reviling his fellow Africans as “savages”. But there is innocence and humour about the writing, too, with English phrases mutating into local forms, echoing the direct effects of colonisation.

Ola Ince’s solemn yet vital and emotional production distils all this, and more, into a spellbinding and riveting two hours and 40 minutes, with two short interludes.

The stage design by Naomi Dawson, with a central concrete arena set with European furniture surrounded by red cracked earth – all under a crucifix provocatively bearing a conspicuously white Jesus – is a clear example of the divisions on show.

It’s a fine play for two reasons. One is that it is potently tragic, hingeing on a hard-won and deeply moving act of forgiveness at the end. The other is that it has terrific stage parts for the actors. Paapa Essiedu is taut with uncertainty throughout as the strict and pious, chaste Chilford.

He is offset by Pamela Nomvete as his insubordinate maid, and Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo as a social climber speaking the Queen’s English.

It’s Letitia Wright, though, who is the play’s dramatic engine, transforming from nervy tribesgirl to a confident young Christian woman. Her role portrays a determination to hold together her past and her present.

This is a serious piece of play writing, which deserves a run in the West End.

Verdict: A potent mix of God and tradition. A missionary’s culture clash in colonial Africa is utterly spellbinding.

★★★★

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