The Crown: as close to history as drama can go

Claire Foy and Matt Smith are impressive in The Crown.

Tom Keneally, no monarchist himself, said we learn a lot of history from our soaps, and it would be interesting to hear what he made of The Crown, the lustrous new 10-episode Netflix saga that treats the Queen from when, as a young princess, she married Prince Philip to the Suez Crisis in 1956.

The Crown is the brainchild of Peter Morgan, the man who brought us Helen Mirren in The Queen (directed by the great Stephen Frears) and who also wrote Frost/Nixon and Mirren’s second foray as Her Majesty, the stage play The Audience.

Morgan is a dabbler in the details and hypothetical dramas of history and The Crown is a winner whichever way you look at it. Claire Foy, Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall, is dazzlingly good as the Queen. She effects a brilliant impressionistic sketch of Elizabeth II with an impeccable cut-glass accent so that we suspend disbelief and feel as if this very good-looking actress is carrying us back through time to the point when “Lilibet” suddenly found herself as monarch. Her father had never expected to become king (until his brother abdicated) and he expected to rule for another generation.

It helps that the first two ravishing episodes of The Crown are directed by Stephen Daldry, the wizard of Billy Elliot, both film and stage musical. They have an effortless lilt and beauty that makes the show irresistible.

We get Jared Harris as George VI trying to cope with his lung cancer. We see Winston Churchill (John Lithgow) re-elected, and there is a tremendous lyrical quality in the scenes between Foy’s Elizabeth and her young husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, played with an insolent sauntering elan by Matt Smith (youngest Doctor Who) as they tour Kenya, only to learn the sunlit honeymoon is in every sense over.

How much history is in The Crown? A lot, which is not to say it’s impeccable. At one point the Royal Standard is lowered over Windsor Castle, which did not happen. The maxim “The king is dead, long live the king” means the monarchy itself cannot die. When an exception was made at the time of the death of Princess Diana it was pointed out that this was a breach of tradition. It hardly matters because when truth and legend clash, legend is bound to prevail.

There’s also the question of selection. Royal historian Robert Lacey says George VI had been quite “peppery” about Prince Philip because he had thought he was a damned socialist like his uncle Lord Mountbatten (who was rumoured to vote Labour), but that’s not something Morgan chooses to pursue. Though we do get the mini-drama of the Duke of Edinburgh wanting the Queen to take his surname (with the support of his uncle who had bequeathed it) and this is apparently historical.

We also get old Queen Mary, George VI’s widow — in a magnificent performance from Eileen Atkins — telling the young queen that the supreme difficulty of the art of monarchy is to learn how to do nothing.

This is entirely credible and it works too as a kind of guiding dramatic principle.

The Crown is about the small and momentous dramas, some poignant, that surround the Queen’s life.

Was there a fuss about something as vulgar as television being used to memorialise the coronation? Yes. Did populism prevail? Yes. Was it because of the canny intervention of Prince Philip? Not so sure. We see Churchill confronting a crisis about smog and hear of how he called his Labour rival Clement Atlee “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”, but then we get an elaborate dramatic thread about his lovely young secretary and her accident.

There’s no doubt about Churchill’s being older and frailer in the 1950s, but The Crown — and Lithgow’s very big performance — make a bit of a meal of it.

Still, you can’t complain that you’re not getting the best of British.

In a gallery of superb English leading men, the standout is Pip Torrens as the steely Tommy Lascelles, the Queen’s private secretary and deadly opponent of Princess Margaret’s desire to marry the man she loved, the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend (Ben Miles).

All of this is true. Lascelles told the Queen — who supported her sister — that Margaret had to wait until she was 25, but no one realised that even then it would require the approval of parliament. Prime minister Anthony Eden, himself divorced, could not offer his support. Princess Margaret, a feistier, more maverick figure than her sister — which Vanessa Kirby’s characterisation captures — said that when she lived near Lascelles at Kensington Palace and he was a frail old man, it took all her powers of restraint not to run him down in her car.

The Crown is very skilled at providing a winding stair of history for the dramas it starts and ends, rather like a soap. There is a lot of flashback that allows for a good deal of palaver from the Duke of Windsor because he, the former Edward VIII, is the touchstone for someone who couldn’t stomach the dire demands of the job that would have required him to renounce the woman he loved.

Some bits of history it might have been nicely to have recapitulated. Like the Queen Mother saying, when Buckingham Palace was bombed during the war: “Now we can look the East End in the face.” Or Churchill stopping George VI from actually going into battle. Both were legends of my childhood.

We get touches about the Queen’s education in constitutional matters, but not the delicious detail that for educational reading she was sent a suitcase of PG Wodehouse.

Still, you could do worse. Morgan’s The Crown is not one of the great television dramatisations of history such as I, Claudius or Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth R but it does cram in a lot of history.

We get a reference to president Dwight Eisenhower talking about “the industrial-military complex” and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser talking to Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam) in edgy Arabic during the lead-up to Suez.

The Queen is, of course, a semi-mythical figure — she can’t talk on chat shows or scribble about her sex life — and she has the tremendous dignity afforded by an adult lifetime of public service. Foy’s performance captures this iron devotion to an ideal so believably that it will go down in history like Mirren’s older Queen and even Jackson’s Elizabeth I.

Queen and history are not strangers. She did speak to Margaret Thatcher out of concern for the striking miners. When everyone was in hysterics about the terrorists’ attack in 2005, she did drive slowly through London’s streets in an open car. The effort of the latter-day Queen to democratise perceptions of the monarchy and let the public in have been all too successful. The royal family can hardly complain if Netflix’s The Crown leads to series after series.

It’s not such a bad advertisement for them.