The Crown, season 4 review: Diana's arrival turns the drama against the royals
The Crown once functioned as the best PR the Royal Family ever had. With the arrival of series four, Palace aides may want to quietly cancel the Netflix subscription. Remember those Windsors you loved in seasons gone by? Tragic Margaret, soulful Charles, feisty Anne? All are transformed into raging snobs and bitter husks. It would take the heart of Arthur Scargill not to root for Margaret Thatcher when she is forced to spend a ghastly weekend at Balmoral, being humiliated by her hosts. “I’m struggling to find any redeeming features in these people at all,” she tells Denis, and often it's difficult to disagree.
Even the Queen is hard to love, although she has moments of compassion. She is played once again by Olivia Colman as an emotionally constipated sovereign, now in middle age, forever putting duty before family and only truly happy in the company of horses and dogs. But this is no longer the Queen’s show. First, she must share the stage with Mrs Thatcher, played with precision and an immovable hairdo by Gillian Anderson. “That’s the last thing we need - two women running the shop,” jokes the Duke of Edinburgh at the result of the 1979 election (at least, I think he’s joking).
The encounters between the two women are a running theme, and make for delicious viewing. But the real star of this fourth season is, inevitably, Diana.
How daunting it must have been for Emma Corrin, an unknown actress barely out of university, to take this on. But the casting is perfect: she grows into the role - and the accent - just as Diana grew into the role of princess. We follow her from giggly teenager to shy fiancée, wretched bride to global superstar.
Her performance is a heartbreaker. Diana is no outsider in class terms - she passes with flying colours the “Balmoral test” that Thatcher so conspicuously fails - but there is no place in the Royal Family for someone emotionally needy. Installed in Buckingham Palace in the run-up to the wedding, devastated by the discovery that her husband-to-be is still very much in love with Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana cuts the loneliest of figures. The show pulls no punches when it comes to her bulimia, with scenes of bingeing and vomiting that come with a “viewer discretion” warning.
Writer Peter Morgan shows no negative side to Diana. He makes her a sweet but fragile young woman desperate for love and affection, which is in short supply from both her husband and her in-laws. The cruelty towards her can be astonishing: did Charles’ private secretary really spring it on Diana, once she had boarded the plane for the couple’s tour of Australia, that the infant Prince William would be taken from her for the first two weeks of the trip?
At one point, a desperately unhappy Diana pulls the Queen into a hug. The Queen stands rigid, arms by her side like a mortified penguin. It is a memorable scene, as is Diana rollerskating along the Palace corridors, bopping away to Duran Duran on her Walkman. We do not see the wedding, only a shot of Diana from behind in that extraordinary dress, as if setting off on a slow walk to the gallows.
The marriage turns increasingly toxic as Diana becomes the darling of the public and Charles boils with jealousy. “This is supposed to be my tour!” he fumes when the crowds call her name. And when she surprises him on his birthday by dancing on stage at the Royal Opera House with Wayne Sleep, he spits: “What were you thinking? Eight minutes they were on their feet cheering for you.” They have one furious row towards the end that all but scorches the screen.
Charles is a selfish, petulant fogey who treats his wife with contempt. But thanks to Josh O’Connor, in what has been the standout performance of the entire run of The Crown, we also feel his pain. Railroaded into the marriage by his family, starved of tenderness in his upbringing, his stooped gait is that of a man forever expecting misery to rain down on his head.
The Queen’s failings as a mother are made painfully apparent during an episode in which she arranges lunch with each of her children, and first instructs an aide: “Please prepare a short briefing document ahead of each meeting, focusing on each child’s hobbies, interests and so forth. One would hate to appear uninformed or cold.”
It all makes for a riveting soap opera. And, against all this, Mrs Thatcher is almost light relief. Morgan has chosen to paint her, until she enters her imperial phase, in a largely sympathetic light (imagine for one moment how the BBC would have tied itself in knots over her portrayal if it had made The Crown). She has her weaknesses - adoring one child and ignoring another, bullying poor old Sir Geoffrey Howe - but the drama humanises her in the way it once humanised the royals. Her relationship with Denis (played with nice understatement by Stephen Boxer) is warm, and her work-life balance endlessly fascinating: calling a meeting at No 10 to discuss the invasion of the Falklands, then whipping on a pinny and cooking supper for the Admiral of the Fleet.
Anderson’s impersonation is a good one but not quite a triumph: she has mastered the walk and the facial expressions but sometimes seems to be straining too hard. She has based the voice on the Prime Minister’s speechifying but doesn't soften it for private moments. In her weekly audiences with the Queen, Thatcher’s manner alters as the years go by: first deferential, then on equal footing as Morgan flags up the parallels (mothers to favoured sons, women operating in a man’s world) and finally - in an episode that sees the two women clash over South African sanctions - openly scornful.
That episode is one of several that makes heavy use of artistic licence. Did Princess Margaret really learn of the existence of two mentally disabled first cousins, callously disregarded by the Queen Mother and locked away in an institution, from a throwaway comment by her therapist? And did Diana really record herself singing a tune from Phantom of the Opera, complete with full orchestra, as an anniversary gift to Charles?
An episode devoted to the Palace intruder, Michael Fagan, is a flight of fancy that gives the Queen some entertaining but very silly dialogue (“Have you come far?”). There is one major error of taste, when scenes of Lord Mountbatten's funeral are soundtracked by an IRA diatribe crowing about the murders.Hatred of Thatcher is channeled through Fagan, who is given lines about her "destroying the country". As the series wears on and we move closer to her eviction from No 10, the Prime Minister becomes less sympathetic. The Left will likely think the portrait too kind, while the Right may bristle at some of Morgan’s claims, such as the inference that Thatcher opposed sanctions to help her son’s business interests. But she remains human.
And what of the minor royals? There is little space in this series for Princess Margaret, who is now an absolute cow, although Helena Bonham Carter injects some pathos. Anne is miserable. Andrew and Edward are dreadful. Sarah Ferguson is glimpsed at the bottom of the stairs but not allowed a speaking part, more’s the pity; this series could have done with a royal who was still having fun.
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Season four of The Crown is now available on Netflix