This Is Not History’s Catherine the Great

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/arts/television/the-great-hulu.html

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LONDON — Buttoning up the fly of his leather pants, Nicholas Hoult was confusing his condiments.

“The line is ‘moose tartar with fresh horseradish and a quail’s egg,’” a producer offered, from the other side of a lushly decorated wall.

“Moose tartar with fresh horseradish …” the actor repeated, practicing the line’s rhythm. He was watched from a few yards away by a larger-than-life oil painting of himself, dressed in imperial Russian garb and holding an unmistakably vulvic piece of cut fruit, while resting a foot on the head of a white bear rug. Then he unbuttoned his pants, ready for another take.

This louche, vaguely ridiculous and “intentionally ahistorical” vision of the 18th century Russian court — actually a set in East London — was brought to you by Tony McNamara, the creator of the Hulu comedy “The Great.” The series tracks the rise of Catherine, who seized power from her husband, Emperor Peter III, in a 1762 coup and went on to become one of Russia’s most famous — if misunderstood — rulers.

McNamara, who also co-wrote “The Favourite,” the bawdy 2018 film set in the court of the 18th century British monarch Queen Anne, brings his signature dirty and absurdist vision of history to the show, which stars Hoult as Peter and Elle Fanning as the young empress he fatally underestimates — Fanning’s first TV lead and first comedic role of any kind.

Featuring 10 hourlong episodes that all arrive on May 15, the deeply irreverent show is witty and self-aware, using a charismatic woman from the past as a conduit through which to explore more modern preoccupations.

It is not alone in this regard, arriving as part of a recent spate of winking, mischievous period productions. In addition to “The Favourite,” there was last year’s “Dickinson,” the Apple TV Plus series that portrayed a young Emily Dickinson twerking and talking like a millennial. This spring brought a cheeky new feature adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma” that had the heroine get a nosebleed just as Mr. Knightley declared his love.

Even more straightforward historical stories, like HBO’s 2019 mini-series “Catherine the Great,” have presented their period drama through a more contemporary lens. Starring Helen Mirren, the series focused on the sexism and romantic difficulties Catherine experienced as a politically powerful woman in a man’s world. (It all but explicitly asked: Can empresses have it all?)

While these shows and films feel like departures from more traditional, “Masterpiece”-style costume dramas, period pieces have always reflected the era in which they’re made, said Alena Smith, the creator of “Dickinson,” in an interview.

“What I think is cool about this new crop,” she said, “is that we’re acknowledging the influence of the contemporary moment right on the face of it.”

Catherine the Great’s life has inspired many big screen productions, including the 1934 film “The Scarlet Empress,” in which Marlene Dietrich played the young ruler. Over the last couple of decades, there have also been several television versions, including the HBO mini-series and two recent Russian series.

In “The Great,” viewers meet Catherine as the impossibly naïve daughter of a struggling German aristocrat. She expects a fairy-tale love story when she arrives in Russia for her wedding to Peter, and she plans to use her power as empress to bring contemporary ideas of equality to Russia, which includes teaching women to read. But what she finds is a cruel husband who shoots people at random, chats with a friend while having sex with his new bride and tells her not to speak in public.

“We’re always asking ourselves, ‘What is the contemporary question?’” said McNamara, who first wrote “The Great” as a play that debuted in 2008. “Not just, ‘I’m trying to take an empire,’ but, ‘What would it be, for a 20-year-old to end up in a really bad marriage that she couldn’t leave?’”

From the opening setup, the show more or less dispenses with historical fact. The real Catherine married Peter when his aunt Elizabeth was still on the throne — in “The Great” Elizabeth is a dotty older woman of the royal court — and Peter actually ruled for only six months before Catherine took his throne. He was also notoriously unattractive and had an erectile problem — a far cry from Hoult’s hunky philanderer — which meant the pair struggled to consummate their marriage, according to Hilde Hoogenboom, a historian at Arizona State University who has translated Catherine’s memoirs.

For McNamara, though, historical accuracy has always taken a back seat to character and tone. As the writers developed the series “we would make bits up,” he said. “Then we’d go, what really happened? And we’d go back and research a bit.”

Even then, “research” meant spending as much time on 18th century France and England as on the details of Catherine’s life. Writers would put interesting tidbits onto a whiteboard and then cherry-pick details that felt “tonally interesting,” McNamara said.

So why make a period piece at all, if you’re going to swerve so far away from the facts?

“Because our own time is quite confusing, I think it’s useful to look back,” McNamara said. “The good thing about period is that there are high stakes to it, which is great for storytelling and great for exploring ideas and people.”

For a modern audience, there is obvious entertainment value in translating the past into an avatar for our current concerns, but is anything lost when the actual history is ignored?

Hoogenboom, the historian who worked on Catherine’s memoirs, said that because HBO’s recent mini-series “gets it right in important ways,” there was space for “The Great” to have some fun. The trade-off, she said, is that viewers miss out on the often captivating psychology behind the historical figures. Elizabeth (played by Belinda Bromilow) and Catherine would never have had cozy chats the way they do in the show, Hoogenboom said. But their real-life dynamic — Catherine warned Elizabeth before her death, for example, that Peter would be a terrible ruler — is fascinating in itself.

After watching the trailer for “The Great,” Carol Leonard, an emeritus fellow at St. Antony’s College at Oxford University who has specialized in Peter III, said, “Don’t tell me that handsome guy is Peter.” Generally, though, she appreciated the creative approach: “Biographies already did what they will with history,” she said, “so why put a cap on it?”

McNamara thinks of Catherine’s legacy as a “great metaphor for our society”: She was an enormously powerful ruler who spread Enlightenment ideas across Europe, but she is remembered in the public imagination for possibly having had sex with a horse. (The apocryphal tale likely originated with Catherine’s enemies; in the late 18th century especially, spreading pornographic rumors was a political tactic used to discredit powerful figures.)

“People can do amazing things and get just pinned as one thing,” McNamara said. “So that seemed like a good place to start.”

For Hoult — who took inspiration from Olivia Colman’s Oscar-winning performance as Queen Anne in “The Favourite” — there is a pleasurable freedom in Peter’s outrageousness. “It’s fun to watch,” he said, to “just enjoy and revel in it.”

“You go, ‘Oh, that’s naughty, you shouldn’t say that,’” he added.

While “The Great” plays fast and loose with period details, McNamara was rigorous about his scripts. Had Hoult wanted to make even a tiny change to his horseradish line, for example, McNamara would have come to set to make sure the comedic rhythm of his writing remained.

“I probably care about it more than I should,” he said, laughing.

The resulting dialogue rises and falls in an almost poetic cadence, and it is littered with creative swearing and descriptions of deeply strange culinary concoctions. (Peter is a big eater.)

“It’s like Shakespeare,” Fanning said, “which I’ve never done, but it feels like that in the way that we speak it.”

Having lords and ladies curse and scream is one of the ways McNamara’s work disrupts the typically restrained period piece of previous generations.

“It’s just a way to break the genre a little bit and let you into the characters a little more,” he said. “There’s something very polite about period stuff, I find often, that keeps you outside the characters.”

He sees the genre as “overdue” for some reassessment — an increasingly popular view, based on the recent flurry of quirky historical stories. Smith, the “Dickinson” creator, sees “period as a way to write a stylized present,” she said.

“Dickinson” broadcasts its modernity with twerking and a soundtrack of songs from Billie Eilish, Lizzo and Mitski. In “The Great,” it’s evident in knowing moments like one in which Peter, standing in front of his mother’s preserved corpse, says, “Someone should work out what goes on between a chap and his mother; there’d be money in that.”

It’s also woven into the clothes worn in the royal court. Peter is violent and ignorant, but the viewer has to like him despite his terrible behavior. So Emma Fryer, the costume designer, modeled his look off bad-boy rock stars, dressing the emperor in skirts and leather pants, velvet and sparkly leopard prints. He wanders the palace with a large gold crucifix necklace swinging into view underneath his unbuttoned shirt.

In the end, Hoult finds the all-powerful Peter’s attempts to seem competent relatable. There are some parts of being human that don’t change all that much, whether you’re an 18th century Russian emperor, a 19th century American poet or an actor on a TV set in 21st century London.

“That’s what we’re trying to do all the time in life, isn’t it?” he said. “Trying to survive.”