My Lady Jane takes an audience with a liberal sense of humour to bite deep into this juicy fruit of a series where women are in charge although the men don’t know it, and people turn into beautiful animals to escape the evil eye. The performances are impeccably spot-on, especially Ann Chancellor as Lady Jane’s mother.
My Lady Jane: Emily Bader, Edward Bluemel Starrer Is An Absolute Delight (Credit: Twitter)
A cheeky irreverence runs through this delightful Elizabethan drama on Amazon Prime. My Lady Jane is much more than just a well-mounted costume drama. It is killingly funny and so well acted that you forget these are all actors in elaborate costumes. It is also a remarkably raunchy and engaging romp into aristocracy, with even the youngest member of the cast mouthing sexual innuendos, without the least hesitation.
In fact, there is a scene where the youngest daughter of the Grey family Margaret (Robyn Betteridge) asks her exceedingly practical and unmaternal mother what her best skill is.
The mother promptly replies with the ‘F’ word for oral sex. Anna Chancellor is a hoot and a scream as the mother Frances Grey of a brood of daughters whom she desperately wants married into royalty. And when one of her daughters Jane (Emily Bader, our heroine) gets a chance to be the Queen of England(albeit for nine days) Lady Frances jumps at the opportunity as if it was a boon from heaven.
In many ways, this delectable subversion of British royalty, beautifully penned by Gemma Burgess from a novel by Jodi Meadows, Brodi Ashton, and Cynthia Hand, nudges Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice in the way the aristocratic mother pushes her daughters into marrying above themselves.
This of course is way above, right at the top of the British royalty.
My Lady Jane feels like a festival of frivolity. But it is actually a lot more. It mocks at scars that never felt a wound(to rephrase Shakespeare). It looks at British royalty with a mixture of amusement, indulgence, and disgust and the voiceover(by Oliver Chris) leaves no doubt as to what the makers think of the royal pout.
Strangely, the series directed by Jamie Babbet and Steven Schwartz, simultaneously celebrates and mocks royal tantrums. Unlike Bridgerton where we never really get a feel of the irony of these misguided elite gliding through a life of giddy courtship and mating, in My Lady Jane we feel the full power of a withering aristocracy wallowing in its nothingness.
While the 16th-century mood is savagely satirical, the series is also sinfully engaging. Watching My Lady Jane is like biting into juicy forbidden fruit. It exudes a sassy sexy vitality seldom seen in period dramas.
But hang on: is this a drama at all?! It feels like it possesses the weight of a drama. But it never takes itself too seriously. As the ladies battle it out for the throne in a milieu that is loath to give them a voice, the plot slides in and out of sticky satirical situations; at one point when an important character is smothered to death with a fruit, mother Lady Frances apprises the crisis, takes the fruit out of the dead man’s mouth and eats it.
It takes an audience with a liberal sense of humour to bite deep into this juicy fruit of a series where women are in charge although the men don’t know it, and people turn into beautiful animals to escape the evil eye. The performances are impeccably spot-on, especially Ann Chancellor as Lady Jane’s mother, Dominic Cooper as a wheeling-dealing aristocrat madly devoted to Princess Mary (Kate O’Flynn) another claimant to the throne, and Rob Brydon as Lady Jane’s cheesy father-in-law.
My Lady Jane is rumbustious and quite simply irresistible.
