PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE
Huzzah! The Great would rather be entertaining than historically correct
I long ago warned myself not to rely on Blackadder for historical knowledge. The British TV series, with episodes set in (roughly) 1485, 1585, 1800 and 1917, is great fun but plays fast and loose with the truth. One show features Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite the fact that Johnson died several years before the other two were born.
So it goes with The Great, Amazon Prime’s new series about the life of Catherine, Empress of Russia.
To begin, it carries the clever caveat “an occasionally true story” at the start of every episode. When, for instance, we learn that the cocktail called the Moscow Mule was invented by Catherine’s lover Leo (Sebastian De Souza) and not a 1940s Manhattan bartender — well, I took it with a grain of salt (and a slice of lime). And there’s no way she ever crossed paths with René Descartes, who died 80 years before she was born.
Similarly, the woman who was born in a part of Prussia that is now Poland would not have spoken with an English accent. But then, neither does Elle Fanning, who hails from Georgia (the
U.S. one), though she manages a convincing imitation, the better to fit in with the mostly British cast.
The Great flows from the pen of screenwriter Tony Mcnamara, working from his own 2008 stage play that was performed in his native Australia. He is best known these days for having co-written The Favourite, another period comedy, set in the court of Britain’s Queen Anne, that was nominated for 10 Academy Awards (including best original screenplay) and took the best actress prize for Olivia Colman.
Much like that film, The Great would rather be entertaining than right. In fact, Mcnamara recently told The New York Times he would make things up first, then go back and do the research, and — possibly — make changes based on what he had learned. Titles aside, the show tips its hand in the opening scene, when young Catherine is excitedly telling a friend she is to be married to Emperor Peter. “Emperor Peter of Russia?” the friend asks. Her clipped, modern reply: “Yep!” The episode later wraps up to the tune of Everybody Wants to Rule the World.
Peter is played by Nicholas Hoult, who can also be seen in The Favourite. According to an Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Peter III from a century ago: “Nature had made him mean, the smallpox had made him hideous, and his degraded habits made him loathsome.” Hoult may not be able to hide his good looks, but in every other respect he inhabits the character’s debauched nature.
When Catherine arrives at the palace in the first episode, she is full of romantic notions of what lovemaking will be like. But they are quickly shattered when he pops by her bedroom on their wedding night for a quick rogering, all the while keeping up a conversation with a friend about a new invention, the duck call.
In reality, Catherine and
Peter were married for 17 years before he took power, while her own coup d’état followed just six months later, in 1762. The Great is clearly looking to speed things up in this respect. Peter is already Emperor when they wed, and that first night of marital blisslessness already has her scheming for something better, both for herself and for Russia.
To that end, the series features a variety of courtly connivers of (naturally) dubious historical authenticity. They include Sacha Dhawan as Count Orlo, a fellow lover of reason, literature and philosophy, none of which finds a sympathetic heart in Peter. (His favourite jape is to sucker-punch people at court.) Douglas Hodge is Velementov, a general, while Adam Godley plays “Arche,” the archbishop. Both the church and the army proved key to Catherine’s eventual power grab.
More central to the story in the early going is Phoebe Fox as Marial, a noblewoman who’s been busted down to serving maid, and acts as Catherine’s confidante. There’s also Gwilym Lee as Grigor, whose friendship with Peter is complicated by the fact that the Emperor has also taken the man’s wife as a concubine.
The Great is definitely a comedy first, but it’s not afraid to throw a few darker moments into the mix, and at times even goes a little Game of Thrones, as when Peter serves the severed heads of defeated Swedish soldiers at a banquet, and commands his fellow diners to pluck out the eyes. (Russo-swedish hostility is a major background detail in The Great, as in life: The two nations spent 77 years at war between 1495 and 1809, in 11 separate conflicts.)
A quarter-millennia after her reign, one rumour about Catherine the Great that refuses to die is the notion that she was killed while trying to have sexual relations with a horse. It’s almost certainly apocryphal, and Mcnamara deals with it succinctly: After Catherine tries her first Moscow Mule, she realizes she late for a coup meeting, and commandeers a mule to get there faster. This not only provides a name for the drink, but fodder for her enemies at court, who start circulating rumours about her equine-philia.
And while the real Catherine made short work of Peter III’S reign, the series’ 10 episodes keep him around while the plot thickens. Clearly a second season is to be expected. To quote the show’s oft repeated line of celebration: “Huzzah!”