Shekhar Kapur’s hyperGothic Elizabeth ‘ starring Galadriel as the Virgin Queen ‘ was so kinetic, so stylish, all dry ice and dark angles, demonic Catholic priests looming against the light, the centenarian Gielgud refulgent in whore’s scarlet as the Pope, that it even got away with Eric Cantona as the French ambassador, his guarded unease oddly good for the part, not to mention wild distortions of historical detail.
Its spawn to date includes a sublime Ray Winstone – “Off wiv er ed yoo slag!” – as Henry VIII, and now Gunpowder Treason and Plot, which casts as Lord Cecil, James Stuart’s brutal chief of security and counter-espionage, no less than Blackadder’s Lord Percy Percy, even though one of Guy Fawkes’s co-conspirators is also a Percy! This is daring. Robert Carlyle (re)plays James at Hitler with a club foot. This is merely daft.
I like bold cartoons which get at the truth by bending the facts: so do Gillies Mackinnon and Jimmy McGovern want to gut anti-Catholicism by making it just pathologically goofy, half splatter, half gurning?
