FROM russia lust WITH

Catherine the Great’s racy love life makes for a rollicking royal drama

Never mind The Crown: if you think our Royals have been beset by tumultuous drama, just wait until you find out what was happening in the Russian court 250 years ago. Admittedly, the sensational new series starring Elle Fanning (above) may not be entirely reliable when it comes to the facts.

But then as we all now know, such historic unreliability holds equally true for Netflix’s saga of the British Royal Family, and at least the makers of this life of Empress Catherine the Great open it with the honest disclaimer: ‘An occasionally true story.’

In any event, sorting facts from fiction when it comes to Catherine was always going to be a tall order. Take your pick from any number of half-truths and extraordinary rumours about her legendarily wild sex life and ruthlessly bloodthirsty score-settling.

So who better for the job than scriptwriter Tony McNamara, whose freely imagined account of the court of Queen Anne proved to be a platform for Olivia Colman’s Oscarwinning performance in The Favourite?

Unconstrained by the niceties of highfalutin period-drama dialogue and stultifying mores, this is an earthy, entertaining and darkly comic vision of the 18th Century tsarist court as a place of licentious behaviour, a frenzy of bedhopping, and where the air turns blue with the kind of four-letter dialogue you’d expect more of sailors than kings.

All of which proves to be something of an eye-opener for the scholarly, idealistic German princess Catherine when she arrives to wed Tsar Peter III (Nicholas Hoult, top left). All too soon she finds her new husband is nothing more than a lazy, pleasure-loving despot – and even the wedding night proves to be a singular disappointment, as Peter takes a scant few seconds to consummate their marriage, all the while chatting with a friend as he goes about his marital duties.

Quickly, whatever hopes Catherine may have had of love disappear, to be replaced with a bitterly determined ambition that will change the course of history.

One of the few child performers to have maintained success into adulthood, 22-yearold Fanning proves a true star, in a central performance that is finely balanced.