Plinth

This is Queen Anne’s court. The 18th century monarch was the last of her Stuart line, and – although she was the first sovereign to rule all of Great Britain – her story has been overlooked in historical dramatisations. Until now, she’s been upstaged by the behemoth reputations of Elizabeth I and Victoria; when we first meet Anne (in Olivia Colman, flawless), you can see why biographers and historians might have held back. Petulant, infantile, fragile and thoroughly spoilt, Anne prefers to leave the affairs of the country in the hands of sharp-witted Lady Sarah Marlborough (Weisz).

Ostensibly, this is to free up valuable cake-eating and bunny-fondling time (she has 17 rabbits, one for every miscarriage and still birth). Beneath the frivolity, though, Anne’s impotence stems from profound self-doubt compounded by atrocious entitlement – a heady, deadly mix. Pushed from pillar to post since birth, a pawn and a queen (literally) on the same chess board, the collision of coddling and utilitarian flattery has made a monster of her. Everyone wants something from Anne, and she swings between granting their every wish and screaming at musicians to stop practicing tunes she can’t herself play. On the one hand, Marie Antoinette: her endless stacks of cream gateaux and blasé attitude towards the fate of her country make Anne infuriating to watch. On the other, a broken woman carried from room to room on the shoulders of people plotting her demise: it feels, at moments watching The Favourite, impossible to imagine a more tragic figure. Ah, but! In bed, all bets are off. A body is a body is a body – and a body is all Anne is sure she has left. Between sheets, she can call in all the favours she wants rather than pulling them out of hats for other people.

It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement; transactional, wordless. The Queen’s ‘favourite’, it emerges, is the one unlacing her corset at the end of the day, climbing into the Royal four-poster bed to deliver a euphemistic ‘leg massage’ and slipping politics between whispered Sweet Nothings. Darling, let’s double the land tax! While we’re never allowed to become voyeurs, Lanthimos flirts as blatantly as Sarah’s usurper Abigail (Emma Stone), offering a close-up on her eyes while nimble fingers work off camera. Hierarchy and heart-felt hatred dance into the Sapphic circle between Anne, Sarah and Abigail – Queen, Lady and Servant – emerging as an amorphous matrix whose true centre proves impossible to find. Are these tussles for business or pleasure? We’re tugged between the two, learning the ropes along with novice Abigail on her journey to the top. A double bass creeps in again and again in The Favourite, taut strings announcing tension: an ugly outcome on the horizon. Brace yourself.

Meanwhile, the audience are radically re-thinking their impressions of the Royal Court. Debauchery descends into something like Les Liaisons Dangereuses crossed with a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. The all-female showdown is wonderfully subversive – a closed loop of lesbian sexual relations that flings adjacent men to the side-lines. Who runs the world? Girls. Who sports the velvet trousers, fires long-barrelled hunting guns, swears like a soldier and satiates their carnal pleasures on screen? The girls, of course! For their part, The Favourite’s frilly men are more like characters from the Rocky Horror Show than Lords of the Realm. How to fill a day, when the serfs are labouring on your land? Yawn. The boys make do, throwing fruit at each other, practicing undignified dance moves and racing ducks for pleasure. In stark contrast, Abigail and Sarah have no time for such silliness – unless frivolity serves a purpose, i.e., placating their mistress. Queen Anne oscillates, a sulky Sun around which planets busily circle, between this and that; war or peace; taxes up or down; Abigail, or Sarah? Anne knows enough to know that questions posed to a monarch aren’t straight forward. She radiates an indignant hurt, a little girl who won’t play because it’s not fair. Her sphere of real influence doesn’t extend far beyond whims (hungry! sleepy! bored!), expressed and pandered to at every opportunity because she knows that’s all she has. Meanwhile, her women are doing the Kingdom’s real heavy lifting. We’re all familiar with the ‘behind every great man’ formula – but was it ever thus?

Queen Anne may be missing from our historical memory, but, thanks to Lanthimos’ fish-eye lens, we are now well acquainted with her physical body: an exposed leg, her creaking frame in a wheelchair or her gout-ridden ankle. Our focus is upon her flesh – desired by Sarah and Abigail – which becomes the site of her power and pleasure, especially without the demands of husband and children upon it. A body is a body is a body; Anne’s childlessness confers a measure of freedom, as well as apparent trauma. Without descendants, and in control of the country’s coffers, this Queen has no use for men – on the contrary, a marriage would put paid to the shred of agency she has left. Defiant, Anne opts for bunnies over business, lovers over spouses, women over men. The women she chooses, as drawn by Lanthimos, invite a stark rewriting of grand narratives. Monarchs have always had mistresses. In much the same way as the lowest ranking member of an organisation tends to know it best – think of the assistant arranging meetings and picking up slack across the board – those close to power have more claim to it than history would like to admit.

By Claire McQue.