The Favourite

seen on 7th January 2019

Yorgos Lanthimos directs Olivia Colean as Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz as Sarah Churchill (nee Jennings, now Duchess of Marlborough) and Emma Stone as Abigail Hill (later Masham) in an irreverent depiction of life at the Court of the last Stuart monarch, replete with personal jealousies and political machinations. Support is provided by Nicholas Hoult as Robert Harley, James Smith as Sidney Godolphin, Mark Gatiss as John Churchill (Duke of Marlborough) and Joe Alwyn as Samuel Masham, though the film concentrates on the personal relations between the three women and the menfolk are largely ancillary.

The three principals give excellent performances, providing some depth to what would otherwise be a very superficial story of sensationalist intrigue. Olivia Coleman's queen is petulant, moody, indulged, but also enduring the physical pain of gout and the emotional cost of numerous stillbirths and the loss of the few children who survived beyond the cradle. Rachel Weisz's Sarah Churchill shows a steely determination to dominate and to use her position to political advantage for her husband, though her command of the situation is by no means flawless as she inadvertently gives Abigail Hill access to the Court. Emma Stone's Abigail soon proceeds to establish her position, revealing herself to be as single-minded as she needs to be to succeed. The film looks very fine, too, with gorgeous early eighteenth-century costumes (and over-the-top male wigs) and luxurious great house surroundings in which to show them off - though I found the frequent deployment of a wide-angle lens to swoop around the rooms distracting and needlessly intrusive.

Alongside the lush visuals is a counter-acting vulgarity designed to destabilise the cosy world of period drama - coarse language and coarse sentiments to belie the aura of gentility usually emanating from depictions of aristocratic life. While this may not at one level be inauthentic - the words at any rate are hardly new, being often jokily referred to as 'good old Anglo-Saxon' - their deployment is jarringly modern, failing to reveal effectively the real cruelty beneath the sophistication of polite discourse.

The victim in all this is historical veracity. The principal characters in the film are real people, but the situations in which they act are distorted and 'simplified' to the point of absurdity. For one thing, it is impossible to determine exactly when the story actually takes place, and how much time passes (one presumes a year or two for the main action). The film is divided into a number of acts with fancy titles (and irritating typography), but no indication of dates. Furthermore the political machinations surrounding the British involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession are completely garbled into a few set piece arguments between Godolphin and Harley pitching military action against financial burdens at home - ignoring the fact the relations between the two were not always antagonistic. The principal domestic achievement of Anne's reign, the Union of the Scottish and English crowns creating the new political entity of Great Britain (1707) is not mentioned, yet in fact it occurred between the first arrival of Abigail at Court (about 1704) and the final rupture between the Queen and the Duchess of Marlborough in 1711.

On a more personal level, the explicit lesbianism of Anne's relations with both Sarah and Abigail are gratuitous and most likely unfounded. Another significant omission from the film is any mention of Queen Anne's husband, Prince George of Denmark, who was alive until 1708 and to whom Anne was devoted. Though much is made of Anne's emotional displacement of affection from seventeen dead children to seventeen caged (or uncaged) rabbits, nothing is said of the otherwise  happy marital background to her life. Anne and Sarah were close childhood friends (Sarah being five years older), and their long intimacy was often effusive and, given Sarah's ambition and Anne's lack of self-confidence, much resented by others; but the existence of a clandestine sexual relationship is only speculative. As for a similar relationship between the Queen and Abigail, this was imputed by Sarah as part of her denigration of the Queen and may be taken as a disparagement prompted by her own fall from Royal favour.

The film-makers are not of course obliged to present a docu-drama, but it is perhaps unfortunate that so many liberties have been taken in order to provide a provocative romp, considering that most people's knowledge of the true historical situation is likely to be slight. Films (and Schiller) are of course continuing to depict a meeting between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, so this reservation is hardly likely to have any effect. But curiously, the decision to sensationalise the story actually drains it of its natural interest and power. There is little sense of the real political questions at stake, nor of the precariousness of  access to power in a Court where personal favour was still so important. Instead we have modern conceptions of female rivalry, blurred chronology, and an opportunistic dalliance with the wilder excesses of late-Stuart London - duck-racing, throwing oranges at a naked man, and a peculiar sojourn by Sarah in a brothel placed who knows where between Hampton Court (maybe?) and the metropolis.

Even closer to the main interest of the film, while Abigail claims (correctly) a family connection to Sarah Churchill, nothing is mentioned or made of the fact that she was also related to Robert Harley. Instead their interactions are reduced to being merely another example of male effrontery, and her reasons for helping him remain opaque.

Helen Edmondson's play Queen Anne produced by the RSC in 2017 and reviewed in my theatre blog in August of that year provides a far richer and more accurate account of many of these events.