National Post (National Edition)
The Crown exists as paean to stability
RESPONSIBILITY WITHOUT POWER HAS ITS CHARMS
Peter Morgan has made a writing career out of the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II. He wrote the film The Queen, which focused on the royal reaction to a single moment of national trauma: the death of Princess Diana. He then wrote the stage play The Audience, a success in London and on Broadway. Like the film it starred Helen Mirren, but it took a more panoramic approach, showing us a series of meetings between Elizabeth and her successive prime ministers. A Canadian production is slated for next year, in Winnipeg and Toronto, with Fiona Reid in the lead. And now, to complete the trifecta, we have The Crown, a Netflix TV series that’s an expansion of The Audience.
The first season of The Crown takes us from 1947, and the wedding of the then Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip, to the brink of the Suez crisis in 1956. That takes 10 episodes. A second season has already been commissioned.
In the meantime we have Claire Foy, doing a very credible job as the young Elizabeth. She has an air of brisk, polite common sense. One of her best moments comes when she’s asked what name she will take as queen. Apparently surprised by the question she says that she, unlike her father and her uncle, will keep her own first name. So England gets its Elizabeth II. It’s a pleasing coincidence that Foy has previously played Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I.
The father and uncle — George VI and his elder brother, briefly Edward VIII — loom large. Alex Jennings, one of Britain’s best, turns up in the third episode as Edward, returned from post-abdication exile in Paris and New York, and pretty much steals the show: an intriguing mix of calculation, resentment, anger and resignation, all of them battling for supremacy when he drops in on his niece to offer her post-accession advice. A sense of duty seems ineradicable in this family, even in the one who got away. Not that this wins him any points with his mother Queen Mary (Eileen Atkins) who, in a flashback to 1936, berates him for deserting his post.
The charge sticks because Jared Lewis, who was the suicidal British partner in Mad Men, gives a comparably affecting performance as the king battling a disease whose fatal extent he is the last to know. When he dies, something goes out of the show’s life as well as the lives and hearts of the people around him. A royal historian, writing in Britain’s Mail, slammed the show for what he deems its apocryphal vulgarities, including this King George’s fondness for obscene limericks. It seems to me one of the most believable things in the script.
The production reportedly cost 100 million British pounds (US$124 million) — a Netflix record. Visually, it’s money well-spent: a parade of stately houses, populated by hundreds of meticulously-costumed extras. As royal soap-opera — no, that’s unfair, as royal domestic drama — it’s persuasive.