The Crown
season three review – Olivia Colman spreads regal rage on toast
TV review
The Crown
Netflix’s
stately saga returns with 10 cracking episodes, a top-notch cast – and a new
queen taking her frustrations out on the breakfast
Lucy Mangan
@LucyMangan
Mon 4 Nov
2019 16.00 GMTLast modified on Mon 4 Nov 2019 17.20 GMT
4 / 5
stars4 out of 5 stars.
We open
with some angry marmalading. The 38-year-old queen (Olivia Colman, replacing
Claire Foy) has seen the updated profile pictures for the stamps’n’money,
reflecting her transition from novice monarch to “settled sovereign”, as her
private secretary delicately puts it, and is taking her feelings out on the
toast. It’s as expressive as the top Windsor is allowed to get.
The Crown
is back for its third season, starting in 1964 and ending 13 years later with
the silver jubilee. There’s a lot to get through and it wastes no time doing
so, while somehow never going at more than a very stately pace indeed. A
royal’s trick if ever there was one.
It is not
the only conundrum presented by The Crown. The main one is: what is it? A soap?
With all the personal dramas, behind-the-scenes machinations and a natural Joan
Collins figure in Princess Margaret (now played, with magnificently casual
disdain, by Helena Bonham Carter), it certainly lathers well. Is it prestige
television? The money up on screen, the attention to detail, the hewing to
British constitutional history and the dragooning of every respected member of
British Equity suggest so.
How much
artistic licence has been taken? Impossible to tell, unless the royals have
been your jam for a long time (though I doubt the coup supposedly planned
against Harold Wilson’s government ever got beyond a few Carlton Club types’
masturbatory fantasies). Is it good or bad? Yes. On the one hand, it’s
tremendous. You’re riveted. By the relentlessly top-notch performances (Tobias
Menzies as Prince Philip gets and relishes all the best lines, but also
deserves special mention for his portrait of a charming, brutal, wounded man),
the cracking story and frisson of forbidden knowledge. And on the other, it has
the action stop every 12 minutes or so – usually for a new prime minister to
come for his first audience with the Queen, or a state dinner at which somebody
under-informed sits next to someone fully informed – for a chunk of exposition
so we all know who everybody is, what ramifications of the next bit of
monarcho-political chicanery are being considered and whether it’s anything we
remember from real life yet.
But like
the royals themselves, it is so confident and so precision-engineered that you
don’t notice the defects – which include lines such as: “Economically the UK’s
right up against it. We’re seeing a terrifying run on sterling and our credit
with the IMF is about to expire!” – that it gets away with everything. And with
two series already behind us, we now have the additional pleasure of being
reunited with old friends. It’s nice to see the Queen more settled into her
role. Good to have Princess Margaret back causing havoc, aided by Snowdon’s
(Ben Daniels) evolution from cad to full rotter since we last met.
Lord
Mountbatten is now Charles Dance. The Duke of Windsor is now Derek Jacobi, but
still persona non grata. A brief hello and sad goodbye to Winston Churchill
(John Lithgow still), and the influx of new characters begins. There’s the
surveyor of the Queen’s pictures – a guy called Anthony Blunt (Samuel West),
and just wait until you see what he’s been up to! – and the Labour PM Wilson
(whose straightforward manner comes to be increasingly appreciated by his
sovereign), Princess Alice (the Duke of Edinburgh’s estranged mother,
exquisitely played with spirit and sadness by Jane Lapotaire), Lyndon B
Johnson, Edward Heath, Arthur Scargill and many others join the ensemble over
the 10-hour stretch.
Princess
Anne (Erin Doherty, bringing the kind of comic relief The Crown could benefit
from more of – the endless repressiveness under which they all labour
eventually takes a toll on the viewer, too) slides into place from episode
four, and in episode six Prince Charles appears. He is occasionally portrayed
as uncannily close to an actual simpleton, but again, whether this is slavish
adherence to under-acknowledged fact or creative licence there is no way of
telling, unless you happen across a suitably drunk and loquacious Fergie in a
nightclub of an evening. Give us a call if you do. I seek clarity on many
issues.
Camilla and
Andrew Parker Bowles perk up the final few episodes, but every one of them is a
masterpiece of a kind – not least the third, which concentrates on the Aberfan
tragedy and ends with a caption noting that the Queen’s delayed response to the
tragedy remains her biggest regret as sovereign.
For
royalists, The Crown will do little to shake faith in the monarchy. It is not a
puff piece, but is far from forensically critical enough to put any cracks in
believers’ certainties. For republicans, the sight of so many birds in gilded
cages will surely inspire greater sympathy for the individuals so constrained,
their instincts ever thwarted by the bars of duty and tradition, while at the
same time expanding their own belief that the whole carceral network is better
torn down for the good of not just the many but also the gamely chirping few.
The amount
of cake The Crown successfully has and eats deserves an award all of its own.
The Crown
returns to Netflix on 17 November.
.webp)
No comments:
Post a Comment