The devil came on horseback.
The Devil's Whore: a BBC drama/mini-series I've been following in production for some time for the actors that are starring in it: John Simm, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Fassbender, and Dominic West. The first episode aired yesterday (?), and all I can articulate as of this moment is: EEEEEE!!
As the series opens, Riseborough's (you'll know her from Happy-Go-Lucky and Being Human) Angelica Fanshawe, the fictional eponymous heroine and our eyes into the war, is a lady of Charles I's court about to enter into a love-match with her cousin, an Earl. The two of them (at least for now) are strict Royalists. Times Online says this about her:
'Of course, the final, and greatest problem of the English Civil War, is: who wins? The English win - hurrah! But the English also lose - boo! And that's the big Civil War problem. Thousands of people die, the character of a nation is called into doubt - and it doesn't give you a straightforward storyline. Oh, the humanity.
'Considerable props, then, to Peter Flannery - the screenwriting demi-god behind Our Friends in the North - who has chopped the Civil War up into four quality chunks for The Devil's Whore. Flannery engages our attention by making the centre of his story neither Roundheads, nor Cavaliers, but Angelica Fanshawe. Married to a Cavalier, instinctively Roundhead, Angelica eventually knocks all the Roundhead/Cavalier nonsense on the head, to become an independent lady highwaymanlady. I know. Amazing.
'Angelica is played by Andrea Riseborough - who is so hot in this that she might well get a Bafta for keeping the elderly warm this winter. ...Riseborough has an all-out field-day playing a fruity 17th-century noblewoman who has to fight her way out of a revolution, in a corset. Riseborough is totally, army-haltingly beautiful in this: her face is a bowl of cherries and doves. Her eyes are like a family-sized sex-feast, for four. With a free litre of Coke. Even surrounded by wars, castles and kings, she is the centre of every frame.'
On the other side, you have Dominic West (The Wire) as Oliver Cromwell, Michael Fassbender (Hunger) as Parliamentary radical Thomas Rainsborough, and Tom Goodman-Hill playing activist John Lilburne. Loyal to neither cause nor philosophy is Edward Sexby, played by John Simm, a professional mercenary with lank hair, a brusing glare and a massive Greebo-worthy scar across one eye, who also happens to be obsessive with Angelica. Riseborough and Simm sizzle unbearably so much when they're on their own, it's a little wonder there isn't spontaneous combustion when they're on screen together (which is not often enough to suit me). But what I really think makes this unique is how many different stories it manages to tell - men and women, Parliamentarian and Royalist, the sweeping and the intimate - in a way that is very novelistic, by turns political drama, the adventure story, female autobiography, and romantic romp. Can you tell I loved this?