BALLROOM BLITZ
Olivia Williams takes us behind the scenes of her new series, which follows the wartime partying of a glamorous London hotel
Defying the bombs of wartime London in style
Iam being powdered white, my hair burned into a Marcel wave, and I’m applying the slash of red lipstick I have come to associate with wartime glamour and the face of Lady Priscilla Hamilton, the character I play for a new television series. The Halcyon – originally pitched as ‘the Ritz in the Blitz’ – is about a London hotel that parties on during World War II while the Luftwaffe’s bombs are dropping all around.
I have worked in this period twice before. First, playing the magnificent Eleanor Roosevelt – no slash of red lipstick there – who, when she visited Blitzed London, was truly shocked by the devastation wrought by the bombs, by the living conditions of the victims and the strictures of rationing. And secondly, when portraying a Los Alamos scientist building the bomb eventually dropped on Japan, causing destruction on such a vast scale that the war finally came to an end. Neither of these previous perspectives had led me to believe that there was much partying to be had in London at the time, and I wondered if there was any truth behind this idea.
Yet legend has it that Churchill exempted the Ritz from rationing so that he could get a decent plate of roast beef accompanied by a good glass of claret. Further clues lie in the archives of this magazine: as is evident in Bazaar ’s society pages, the clientele, the decor, the music and the bands playing in London’s fashionable hotels were at the centre of any conversation that wasn’t about the war. This is a version of wartime London that I haven’t seen depicted in recent television shows – the Blitz spirit exemplified, not in singing songs on the platforms in the Underground bomb shelters, but in choosing to party, because the precariousness of tomorrow meant snatching at fun today.
The Halcyon is crowded with the diversity that war brings to London: refugees and workers of all classes from Europe and the empire, who come to dance, to stay, to live or to work at the hotel. It is a place of music and movement, where the old order is disrupted, so that classes and cultures are forced to rub up against each other on the dancefloor and in the workplace. The details from the society diarists of the day are brought to life, then set against the stark realisation that the entire mirrored pleasure palace could shatter at any moment – as did the Café de Paris (where we filmed our most raucous dance scene), which was famously bombed in the Blitz, killing musicians, revellers and staff alike.
The series opens towards the end of the Phoney War, when Lady Priscilla Hamilton’s dilemmas are limited to the hiring and firing of staff and dealing with her husband’s mistresses. As the war progresses, the knot tightens on her rarefied life, and carpe diem gives way to desperation.
Some are ennobled by war and some see it as an opportunity to exploit others. Lady Priscilla, a far from exemplary citizen, is caught between the two, in a brief – one might call it a halcyon – period, when it was still possible to ignore what was to come; before the reality and the bombs hit home…
‘The Halcyon’ will air in early January on ITV.