Channel 4's new drama The Devil's Whore is set during the English Civil War. Its stars and writer tell Serena Davies why the period is so ripe for dramatisation.

The Devil’s Whore, four-part costume drama, is full of wild storms, furious winds and camera angles so eccentric they make it look like chaos has come to Earth.

The story’s genuinely new: this particular trip back in time isn’t, for once, a literary adaptation. And it’s full of all that crazy weather because its talented director, Marc Munden (The Mark of Cain), is trying to conjure a sense of impending apocalypse.

This is a tale set in the English Civil War about a fictional woman, Angelica Fanshawe, and how her life intersects with the real events and key figures of the time, including Charles I and Oliver Cromwell.

To many who witnessed this period in British history, apocalyptic was just how it felt. In the 1640s fighting engulfed the country and the rule of law collapsed: it was the end of the world as people knew it.

“It’s the crucible for the European revolutions,” says scriptwriter Peter Flannery, who also wrote the BBC’s Bafta-winning Our Friends in the North and has created this new story in collaboration with historian Martine Brant. “It radicalised a lot of people and left a legacy of ideas which we’re still battling out. We might have ended up with a proto-Soviet system.”

For one person, of course, it was a disaster. The king of England is a central figure in Flannery’s drama. “Charles I was a man accumulating the skills of a renaissance prince just when his kingdom was falling into a Balkanisation,” says Peter Capaldi, whose Charles is gaunt and stuttering – viewers will be pushed to recognise this actor as the vituperative Malcolm Tucker from the BBC’s political satire The Thick of It. The part is a gift in dramatic terms, Capaldi says. “Charles was a fascinating character, both tragic and holy.”

The Devil’s Whore has the pace – and the occasional fruity scene – of a historical romp. But it’s better written and has a more original, sumptuous look to it than the likes of BBC2’s lamentable take on Henry VIII, The Tudors. “Sometimes you look at a shot and think, ‘Oh, that looks like a painting,’” says Capaldi. “But what do we know about framing and lighting that is greater than Vermeer or Rembrandt?”

Beyond Capaldi, there’s an impressive haul of acting talent in the cast. Angelica Fanshawe is played by newcomer Andrea Riseborough, whose impersonation of Margaret Thatcher in BBC4’s Long Walk to Finchley impressed critics, but whose chalk-white skin, heavily lidded eyes and soaring forehead make her look like she’s walked straight out of a Van Dyck painting. An effervescent 27-year-old, she’s also feisty enough for the fearless Angelica. “Strong women like Angelica were ten-a-penny during that time,” she asserts with a pout, when it’s suggested her character’s ballsy-ness isn’t quite what you’d expect of the period.

Also in the cast are The Wire’s Dominic West as a glowering Oliver Cromwell, Michael Fassbender, who plays Bobby Sands in the new film Hunger, as the mysterious radical Thomas Rainsborough and Life on Mars’s John Simm as the malevolent mercenary Edward Sexby. West voices the sentiment of many of the male actors when he says what fun it was filming the piece – which was done in South Africa, for budgetary reasons. “Sword fights, charging about on horseback – it was brilliant. Exactly what you always wanted to do since the age of six.”

Where The Devil’s Whore was filmed may not have been authentic but pains have been taken in its historical research. Martine Brant, for instance, suggested the seemingly far-fetched incident when, on her wedding day, Angelica strips off her garter and flings it to a gaggle of men from a contemporary tradition at the time (pictured left). “Whoever got the garter got bragging rights,” she explains.

Flannery says he used the Bible for help with the script’s language. “One of the first things I did in my research was read the Bible. That’s the only book they all knew,” he says. It’s responsible for some surprisingly modern-sounding lines, too. “There’s a scene in the first episode where Sexby talks of there being no one left to kill in Germany and says, ‘There’s not one left to piss against the wall.’ That phrase is straight from the Bible.”

Flannery and Brant are also working with an advantage. The Civil War is barely ever dramatised on the small screen. There was By the Sword Divided made by the BBC over 20 years ago, a drama “so ropey”, says Flannery, that “there is only one exterior scene, where a wheel falls off a carriage as it’s going up a hill – and they didn’t even bother to reshoot it. The whole thing must have cost 14 shillings and sixpence.”

Flannery can’t comprehend the period’s neglect. “I can’t for the life of me understand it,” he says. “Also, for a writer, it’s the most glorious landscape for love stories and action.”

It seems, Channel 4 was lucky to snap it up at all. Flannery says he feels so messianic about his subject matter that, “If this production had fallen through I personally would have written it as a trilogy for the Royal Shakespeare Company.”


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