The story of Catherine the Great, but not as you've seen it before

It takes enormous courage in the historical drama genre to declare that your work plays fast and loose with the facts. Most such period epics are obsessed with getting it right, or hiding the cracks where they have parted ways with the history books.

The Great, Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara's hilarious take on the life of Russian sovereign Catherine the Great, does none of that. Instead it wears the badge of "historically inaccurate" with some pride, McNamara says.

Elle Fanning takes centrestage in Tony McNamara's historical drama The Great.Credit: Ollie Upton / Hulu

"I think the title card reads 'an occasionally true story'," he says, laughing. "And yet it was important to me that there were tent poles of things that were true. How she dealt with smallpox, trying to bring a vaccine to the country, her being a kid who didn't speak the language, marrying the wrong man and responding to that by deciding to change the country."

Those events, McNamara says, "show the essence of her courage, the things she struggled with and the things she wasn't perfect with. There were certain bedrock things I was like, 'We're going to do this, this and this. Within that we can do other stuff that we've made up.' It's not a history lesson but we owe a certain loyalty to our idea of her and what she meant."

The Great stars Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, and Nicholas Hoult as Peter III, her husband and, ultimately, the man she overthrew to claim power for herself. As with McNamara's film The Rage in Placid Lake, which was based on his play The Cafe Latte Kid, The Great is based on another of McNamara's stage works, a play of the same name mounted by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2008.

''When I write theatre, which I do less now, there is a lot of freedom," McNamara says. "You can do anything stylistically. I think that wasn't the case with TV and that's what's changed dramatically. TV's become a wild, try-anything kind of world so I think it gave me an ability to just try this crazy way of writing a period comedy.

Fanning, pretty in pink, as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia.Credit: Jason Bell / Hulu

"We tried to make The Great as a film and for a long time people didn't want to spend that kind of money on something that seemed, tonally, such a roll of the dice," McNamara adds. "It took a long time for TV to change and then luckily I wrote The Favourite for Yorgos [Lanthimos, the director] and that helped period things that were a bit different get across the line."

Unusually in the realm of stage or book-to-screen adaptations, much of The Great has made the transition intact, McNamara says.

"The show is based on the first 40 minutes of the play, because the second half of the play was a much older Catherine the Great and the first half was young Catherine coming to Russia," he says. "Tonally, it's very, very similar. Probably, lots of the scenes from the play are in the show, more or less complete."

Though the production tackles the life of the young woman born Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg with some mischief, McNamara is a passionate defender of her reputation. History is unkind to her, he says, because it is largely written by men, but also because her enemies put to the page a version of her that served them politically.

"It seemed like her life had been reduced to a salacious headline about having sex with a horse," McNamara says. "Yet, she'd done an enormous amount of amazing things, had been a kid who'd come to a country that wasn't her own and taken it over.

"One of the things she was completely unapologetic about was her sexual life," McNamara adds. "She saw it as a strength and people used [that] against her. The horse rumour was just a political cartoon. I think it wasn't kind to her and so maybe this redresses the balance a little bit."

Given the success of another of McNamara's projects, The Favourite – a period comedy about the rivalry between two royal cousins vying for the approval of Queen Anne in 18th century England − McNamara has become something of a go-to man for period comedy, even though that is not a space he ever sought to step into as a writer.

"It's a little bit odd because most of the stuff I did was very contemporary," he says. "In TV, Love My Way and Tangle, very dramatic but very contemporary work. I didn't really want to do a period thing, per se, I just wanted to write about Catherine the Great and then The Favourite came along."

McNamara has written a new film for Lanthimos, another period story, he says, but does not divulge details. Now passionate about the genre, McNamara says it gives him a scale that is difficult to capture in contemporary storytelling.

"I think that scale is something that I like as a writer because it gives me a little more leeway, a little more freedom to be extreme," he says. "It accidentally played into my strengths as a writer. So it freed me up in a way that maybe contemporary stuff didn't, to be stylistically bold."

The genre also gives him freedom to lurch between frivolous comedic moments and emotionally devastating moments. Bridging the two tonalities is challenging but achievable, he says, so long as everything on the page is true to the character.

"As long as they're very true to that moment, they're not reaching for the jokes so much, it's just about them responding and that moment happens to be funny, then when something terrible happens and they respond to that, I think for the audience it all feels true," he says.

McNamara cites the examples of writer Larry Gelbart, who developed M*A*S*H, and filmmakers Hal Ashby and Mike Nichols, as masters in that field. "In M*A*S*H, for example, it's out-of-control funny and then they're in an operating theatre and people are dying all around them," McNamara says. "Larry doesn't walk away from either. He takes the moments when the deaths happen. That's what I grew up watching and that's always been my favourite kind of writing."

The Great premieres on Stan on May 16. Stan and this masthead are owned by Nine.