Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
TEMPTATION IN TANGIER
A troubled heiress, a gay English lord, a highly desired courtesan. Their paths all cross in sensual but high camp new drama Little Birds
Spicy new period drama Little Birds tells a story of forbidden love and sexual awakening in 1950s Morocco – a hotbed of spies, spivs and scandal
even desired by the French governor of Morocco, is deliberately not political. But when she sees a young nationalist Moroccan being whipped to death by a French soldier it changes her. ‘She’s kind of torn between two worlds – her people in Morocco and the colonisers,’ says Yumna. ‘Her journey is twofold. One is her coming back to her roots, being OK with letting go of her need for the colonisers. But when she meets Lucy she sees in her something that’s very familiar in herself. That allows her to let go of all this anger that she has.’
But while the series is about sex and power, the eroticism comes more from what it doesn’t show than what it does. ‘It’s quite prim in some ways if you compare it to Game Of Thrones,’ says producer Ruth Mccance. ‘One important thing for us was that this was erotica, but nothing gratuitous. It’s very much about desire, which is much more interesting to see played out on screen.’
The character of Lucy is an amalgamation of several characters in Nin’s Little Birds collection, while Cherifa was just a tiny part in a story called The Queen. ‘I first read Little Birds when I was 17 on a plane journey,’
‘It’s about desire, but it’s not gratuitous’
recalls Juno. ‘It was my introduction to this world. It really opened my eyes to a new way of writing and what real eroticism is. In a funny way, I think Lucy is on that same journey of discovery in this show. She has so many things going on inside her. It’s like a bubble bath where the bubbles keep coming up but she can’t let any of them out. She falls head first into this wondrous universe when she sees Cherifa get up on a stage in a nightclub and act like she’s stronger than all the men in the room. It’s something Lucy learns from her.
‘Lucy starts off as this little bird of paradise who’s there to be looked at. By the end she has escaped her cage. The show is really about people getting to know themselves and be OK with it, even if they’re not who they necessarily thought they were or who they wanted to be.’