Costume trauma
’Penny Dreadful’ is a grisly grab-bag of gothic Victoriana — and good fun
YOU know something you never see in a Victorian TV drama? A woman in a bonnet answering the call of nature. Yet the opening scene of the first episode of Showtime’s new series Penny Dreadful featured exactly this. As the Pistorius trial has taught us, toilets can be dangerous places. The poor lady couldn’t even finish relieving herself before being sucked through a window by some unseen force.
“Penny dreadfuls” were racy, melodramatic works of fiction sold cheaply to Victorian audiences hungry for a thrill who didn’t have the benefit of cable TV. The choice of this title for the TV series is both a knowing dig at the sensationalist hokum offered up by the show, and one of a number of literary references which give it a highbrow patina. Victor Frankenstein and his monster are in attendance; so too is the mysterious Dorian Gray.
If this makes Penny Dreadful sound like homework, it really isn’t. It’s a horror story with blood, guts and sex — in sufficient quantities for M-Net to have slapped an 18 rating on it, which seems possibly exaggerated in a world where teenagers run their own porn empires. The show does succeed in being deeply creepy; the opening sequence is enough to give you grille. Enter scorpions, larval grubs and overflowing cups of blood. I’m more of a rooibos fan, myself.
Penny Dreadful comes courtesy of the team who gave us the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, and two of the lead actors are Bond veterans. Former 007 Timothy Dalton plays explorer Sir Malcolm Murray, with ex-Bond girl Eva Green as his haughty companion Vanessa Ives. The two recruit a travelling US gunslinger, Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), to assist in investigating the disappearance of Murray’s daughter — the unfortunate woman plucked off the loo.
Murray has good reason to be concerned, because there’s an epidemic of gory attacks on women happening all over London. This isn’t Jack the Ripper stuff; there are some scary-as-hell Gothic beasts coming out of the woodwork.
“Do not be amazed at anything you see,” Sir Malcolm tells Ethan as they move through a terrifying opium-den-cum-mortuary; easier said than done when you’re being attacked by creatures of the undead at every point. When young scientist Victor Frankenstein is assigned to slice open one of these zombie figures, what they find is ... well, I’m not sure, truthfully.
“It would appear that what you have here is an Egyptian man, of no particular age, who at some point in his indeterminate lifespan decides to sharpen his teeth, cover himself with hieroglyphics and grow an exo-skeleton,” announces Frankenstein. “Or you have something else altogether.” It’s definitely the latter.
As a bit of a sideshow, Dr Frankenstein has just succeeded in bringing a human man back to life. He is a particularly gormlesslooking life form, but Frankenstein seems chuffed to bits. The scientist lets him pick his own name by stabbing his finger at random into the collected works of Shakespeare. He ends up with Proteus, which was lucky because it could easily have been Coriolanus.
It’s all preposterous stuff. Vanessa gets dramatically possessed by the Egyptian goddess Amunet at a fancy dinner party, as is always a risk after one too many glasses of claret. “If one is to engage with the primordial forces of darkness, one must expect a bit of social awkwardness,” the host shrugs in a stoic British way afterwards.
Surrender yourself to pure melodramatic absurdity, and you’re in for a good time. Just don’t forget to close the bathroom window when you pee afterwards.