Becoming Elizabeth, review: injects familiar history with fresh wit and intrigue – and lots of sex

Aren’t we through with the Tudors? Surely after Wolf Hall there was an industry-wide moratorium abolishing the dynasty from our screens, while we all thought about Plantagenets and Saxe-Coburg-Gothas for a while instead? If there was, then Becoming Elizabeth (Starz) has taken an axe to it to imagine the precarious teens of our Virgin Queen.

From the opening storyboards it’s obvious why this keeps happening. Henry dead, England in turmoil, three children from different mothers, one Catholic, another Protestant, the third undecided. Those six marriages are the gift that keeps on giving. Family, power, religion, sex, death: what other ingredients should any storyteller need?

Becoming Elizabeth cannily crowbars its way into a niche section of the narrative. Edward VI is the new tween monarch. His uncles, the brothers of Jane Seymour, jostle for influence. Edward the prissy Duke of Somerset (John Heffernan) appoints himself Lord Protector, while sleazy pin-up Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen) seduces the king’s widow.

Ah yes, that’ll be Catherine Parr, the sixth Spice Girl as it were (Survivor Spice?). Neither divorced nor beheaded, she’s always been a bit of a forgotten blank slate. Here, she is fascinatingly fleshed out as a seething stepmother who schemes to maintain her status. In our first sight of her, she’s rolling in a four-poster with her dead husband’s buff former brother-in-law. Good for her. She’s very watchably played by Jessica Raine as a boiling pot whose lid is about to blow off.

But there are three in this marriage (it’s scarcely a spoiler to reveal she and Thomas get spliced in episode two). They are housing the 14-year-old Elizabeth, almost as a hostage, and Thomas soon turns into an abusive groomer. His campaign to bed an underage princess is performed with ghastly, insinuating subtlety. As for Elizabeth, it’s a relief to read that Alicia von Rittberg is in her late twenties, but she manages not to seem it as delight, terror and confusion play out on her face. It’s an impressively complex performance.

Meanwhile over at court, the Lord Protector is having a bumpy ride training up the snotty colt Edward (Oliver Zetterström). For a pre-pubescent 10-year-old the King perhaps seems implausibly fluent in matters of the realm. He is also taken to blurting brattish things like “I am the f---ingKing!” in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Game of Thrones’ Joffrey.

As with the start of any series, even one where introductions are barely necessary, Becoming Elizabeth takes a while to work up a head of steam. The dialogue contains quite a bit of idiot-board signposting – our daughter Jane, my sister Mary, your brother the King etc. Yet by episode three it has taken on a propulsive intensity, largely thanks to Anya Reiss’s sweaty, seamy, salty script, full of vomit and piss and cruelty. She injects high stakes and theatrical confrontation into almost every scene. Everyone in her canvas – persecuted Mary (Romola Garai), even poor little Jane Gray (Bella Ramsey) – is a desperado competing for oxygen.

Mainly played out in a candle-lit wood-panelled interiors, it’s all very handsome to look at, if claustrophobic. It’s a relief to board a coach or mount a horse and get outdoors now and then, even if the one battle scene is peopled by, seemingly, a dozen members of a skirmish re-enactment society.

The production design does its bit to root us in that world, only for the performances – caught on intrusive wobbly cam by director Justin Chadwick – to argue that human behaviour never changes. That’s why historic quibblers should not object to the stag hunt in which under her floor-length coat young Elizabeth is seen to be in trousers. It’s a forgivable anachronism in a horrifying history that explains, ever so moreishly, how she came to wear them as queen.