selenak

When I first started to hear about this film, I thought the story sounded very vaguely familiar, but it took months before I realised it's based on the same era, and partly on the same personel, as Eugene Scribe's play A Glass of Water, which I had seen in a 1960 filmed version, starring Liselotte Pulver as Queen Anne (decades younger and without 17 dead children), Sabine Sinjen as Abigail, Hilde Krahl as Sarah Churchill and Gustaf Gründgens as Henry St. John, who is based on a different Tory politician but roughly has a similar role to Harley in The Favourite. The reason why it took me months to realise the connection was that Scribe's play (which was first staged in 1842) is utterly without same sex relationships - Anne, Sarah and Abigail are after the same guy, Masham -, then there's Anne as a young ingenue queen, and lastly, the dominating figure and hero of the play is the worldly, aphorism-dropping Henry St. John, who champions peace with France, while Sarah (and her off stage husband, the Duke of Marlborough) are the definite villains, characterized as a couple of greedy war mongers prolonging the war with France for their own financial benefit. (BTW, this in a French play filmed in Germany in 1960 is not surprising.) Abigail, Queen Anne and Masham the universally desired boy toy are all young, naive and none too bright.

The Favourite, almost needless to say, tells a very different story.

( Spoilers play a very different kind of game )

In conclusion, it's a vicious, highly entertaining comedy of manners with three great leading ladies, and does live up to the hype. And given the Black Sails backstory with the Hamiltons starts during Anne's rule, I definitely want crossovers.