Hair-raising, horrible but you can’t stop watching A Very British Scandal

A Very British Scandal tells the tormented story of the Duchess of Argyll, the first woman in modern British history to be slut-shamed.

Claire Foy and Paul Bettany in A Very British Scandal.

A Very British Scandal comes in the wake of A Very English Scandal in which Hugh Grant, in the performance of his life, played Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal politician who was accused of conspiring to murder his male lover, played by Ben Whishaw.

A Very British Scandal has Claire Foy as the Duchess of Argyll (pictured), sometimes described as the first woman in modern British history to be slut-shamed, and Paul Bettany as the husband who does the shaming. Both performances have a staggering power that leaves almost all the nominated Oscar performances looking like pale imitations of what acting can achieve.

The duchess has been married before and says to her girlfriend Maureen, played by Julia Davis (who provides a fine fatuous vignette), that she’s good at sex, unlike her, and why shouldn’t she thrive on it? She meets the duke, the more or less penniless Bettany, who says the pension he’s getting will bring in less than if he peddled his arsehole in the Glasgow docks. There’s a weird riveting chemistry between them, though you come to realise they are both crippled and treacherous.

She pays off his debts, sometimes off her own bat, sometimes with the help of her affable dad, played by Richard McCabe. Then she comes to fear for her own future and indulges in a bit of forgery that is also an act of perfidy. Eventually he finds out and the legal massacre ensues. But there is nothing neat about the crucifixion of the duchess. A Very British Scandal is an intimate and mesmerising depiction of two people of magnetising charm who live in a twisted world of mutual treachery.

For what it’s worth, it’s a portrait of vertiginously upper class life from the late 1940s to the early 60s, and every madness the Argylls inflict on each other is grounded in this world, yet the action never descends into a moralised sociology.

The duke, as the sometime Captain Ian Campbell, was a prisoner of war in Germany and he confesses late in the piece that he has never felt a thing except that this war against his wife keeps his blood banging. She is a goodtime girl – fresh, open, affectionate – but with in-built insecurities that drive her to deeper betrayals than the adultery that inevitably comes in the wake of the heartbreak and the spectral face of her husband’s psychopathology.

There’s something breathtaking about the realism and the nakedness with which A Very British Scandal presents the nonchalant grace of a couple of people who at a glance you might kill to have dinner with, who are in fact as mad and malevolent as meataxes.

It’s extraordinary to see Foy exhibit all the poise and pensiveness – all that power of understated consideration that made The Crown such a convincing and sympathetic portrait of the young Queen – as she battles for her sanity, sometimes virtually for her life, with a man who comes to hate her as he hates himself with a nearly reflex brutality, tormented and towering.

Foy and Bettany inhabit the glamour of the class they embody so deftly, yet A Very British Scandal allows you no opportunity to sigh fondly because this is a world that makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like so much comic banter. Wives can be discarded like whores, children can be derogated for the sake of security: it’s hair-raising, it’s horrible, but you can’t stop watching every second of it.

Foy’s face fills with wide-eyed wonder, then with the absolute confidence of someone who knows her drop-dead charm (in which a veil of modesty plays its part) will conquer all. Her Duchess of Argyll is the queen of the circumference of the world she inhabits, but then what should be the privilege of class and wealth and the most grand-sounding title melts into air – she is yoked to a dangerously brutal man who cares for nothing but her money and the casual desirability of her flesh.

But after all this is not quite true. Bettany’s duke has a sort of glinting irony; he can see through or almost see through the masquerade he’s perpetuating though this makes things worse because there is a sort of driven intelligence in every compulsive move towards hatred.

And Foy’s duchess, who might have been the happy-go-lucky, erotically fulfilled trophy of this ruined golden boy, becomes not just the plaything of a heartless cruelty but complicit in a pas de deux of wickedness.

Is it less her fault than his? Yes. None of which stops A Very British Scandal from being a breakneck depiction of what could be done to a woman – even a grand, titled rich woman – by the courts and the press and the brutality of a world whose bias is masculine.

We watch Foy trying to stop a dodgy doctor from feeding Bettany amphetamines, we know that with slight but fundamental adjustments the love that is born of romance might have done more than flicker, it might have been some bonfire of typecast fulfilment, but that makes the pessimism of A Very British Scandal such a fatality as well as such a graphically magnetic and such a histrionically magnificent enactment of doom.

Foy and Bettany are so dazzlingly good that you scarcely see the style, it is so subsumed in a realism that is ashen.

That said, A Very British Scandal, written and produced by Sarah Phelps and directed by Anne Sewitsky, is not quite on par with A Very English Scandal, directed by the great Stephen Frears and with Grant turning his comic genius inside out to give a performance of harrowing complexity and brilliance. The script of A Very British Scandal, though very good, is not quite as good and the circumambient world of lawyers and lovers is less fully fleshed out.

It scarcely matters because almost no one is going to equal the splendour and the squalor that Foy and Bettany achieve. They succeed in embodying something that other fine performances are shadows of. Foy was Andrew Davies’s Little Dorrit as well as Anne Boleyn in the Mark Rylance Wolf Hall, and in The Crown she re-created the image of the Queen like a revelation. Bettany didn’t yield an inch to Russell Crowe in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

But they will never do anything better than this because acting doesn’t get any better. These performances are to die for and everyone with an interest in the amount of feeling drama can yield should watch them. Never mind the panache of aristocracy or the iron hand of the patriarchy. This is the real thing.

A Very British Scandal is on Amazon Prime from Friday.