My Lady Jane, review: a sweary, sexed-up Wolf Hall for teenagers
My Lady Jane (Amazon Prime Video) could be innocently mistaken for something generated by ChatGPT. You can picture a bot processing the command to take a minor figure from Tudor history – a nine-day queen, say – and make her a feminist pin-up.
Give the story a bouncy Alice in Wonderland vibe, plentiful softcore sex and a rocking soundtrack with feisty female-voiced covers of ye olde pop classics. Make it ironic but also heartfelt, and chuck in a supernatural subplot. No wheel is reinvented here, but suppress your memories of Wolf Hall and this eight-part romp is actually good fun.
Lady Jane Grey, memorialised by the National Gallery’s Delaroche painting of her execution, is given agency – and expertise in botanical medicine – in an alt-history bonfire of Tudor tropes. So Edward VI is black and prefers boys, Mary Tudor is a stroppy villainess and Princess Bess is a doe-eyed drip.
Meanwhile several characters – and this really doesn’t seem to be in the history books – are so-called “Ethians” with the ability to morph into a bear or a hawk, a snake or a spaniel or, in the case of one lustrously fetishised uber-hunk, a chestnut stallion. Everyone else, in a witty snipe at identity politics, is termed “cismorphic”.
What really underpins the sense of déjà vu is the figure of Jane. Played with gamine energy by Emily Bader (who you’d never guess is American), she is the absolute spit of Jenna Coleman’s spirited Queen Victoria.
Of the cast’s more familiar faces, none turns in a performance not already given elsewhere: Anna Chancellor schemes, Rob Brydon blusters, Dominic Cooper sneers, Jim Broadbent hollers. That said, they’re all a hoot, none more than the Mary played by Kate O’Flynn, a gifted comedian who munches on the scenery with savage relish. Most outrageous of all is Oliver Chris’s voiceover, delivered in the style of a world-weary posho.
It’s resplendent to look at – the costumes as much as Herstmonceux Castle. Who’s it all for though? Despite name checks for Julian of Norwich and Thomas Wyatt, and a fun nod to The Godfather’s horse head scene, the script sourced from a Young Adult novel has the mental age of a CBeebies drama. It would be best enjoyed by kids but for the locust cloud of F-bombs and a rabid focus on what one serving wench coyly terms “marital purposes”. Sexy, sweary and infantile, this is one for your (inner) teen.
My Lady Jane begins on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday 27 June
