Saucy Extravagances
Sun Herald
Sunday May 23, 2004
BUSINESS must be booming for Europe's peruke providores, lace makers and fencing coaches. Between lavish miniseries and documentaries, 21st-century television screens are awash with wigs and heaving bosoms.
This week's schedule, in particular, is infested with period pieces as the ABC and SBS wheel out productions set in two royal courts: those of England's Charles II and Prussia's Frederick the Great.
Both are four-parters and both cost, if you'll excuse the phrase, a king's ransom. Charles II: The Power And The Passion is a co-production between the BBC and America's A&E while Between Love And Duty, the true tale of Prussian aristocrat-soldier Baron Friedrich von der Trenck, is the most expensive historical TV drama ever made in Germany.
They are both opulently staged and, while both series dwell on the nature of power, loyalty and political expediency, they share something else that's more immediately evident: sex.
Charles II is the saucier, hardly surprising when you combine a subject famous for his hedonism with the trend for broadening history's appeal by cranking up the sex and violence. Writer Adrian Hodges has said that in bringing Charles's story to the small screen, he was most interested in aspects that would resonate with today's audience: human emotions such as jealousy and desire and shifting political landscapes.
Politics assumes a bigger part as Rufus Sewell's exasperated king, the ultimate politician, tries to find a politic middle road amid the religious extremism racking his kingdom.
As Charles, the oddly dead-eyed Sewell does a decent job of conveying a kingly contradiction. Charles is intelligent, ruthless, hard-headed; but vain, unsure and weak, particularly with women. Sewell's charismatic performance suggests passion and swagger rather than the foppishness that might have befallen a less manly Charles. For all Sewell's presence, it's the women in Charles's life
- and the life in his women - that defines the series.
Chief among them is the promiscuous, scheming Barbara Villiers who bonks the king, his best friend and son. In her quest to consolidate her position, she intrigues, pimps for the king and threatens to kill her baby unless Charles will acknowledge him as heir.
Helen McCrory (Anna Karenina) plays Barbara with an erotic, scene-stealing intensity. Against Villiers's volcanic personality, Charles's Catholic queen Catharine (The Way We Live Now's Shirley Henderson), is a mouse.
She arrives from Portugal with a pious demeanour that is as bizarre at Charles's debauched court as her immense 'do. She is adrift at first - her untranslated gabble at Charles on their wedding night a masterstroke of miscommunication - but as time goes by, it is Catharine who best understands him.
It's chocolate-box drama, but the chocolates are dark, rich, naughty ones.
Things are less debauched in the upright 18th-century Prussian court of King Frederick, but no less troubled romantically. The action begins with a bawdy romp in which a law student, the thatch-haired Baron von der Trenck (Ben Becker), cuckolds a man, then humiliates him in a duel.
The Baron's reputation as a brilliant troublemaker wins him the king's personal invitation into the royal guard where Trenck falls for the king's high-spirited sister (Alexandra Maria Lara). Their love invokes the wrath of his monarch and military commander (who fancies the princess himself). The story's a cracker as subsequent events traverse prison, war, love . . . and lots and lots of wigs.
*** Between Love And Duty, SBS, Sunday, 7.30pm.
*** 1/2 Charles II: The Power And The Passion, ABC, Sunday, 8.30pm.
© 2004 Sun Herald
