Wits and Brits: why Liz Duffy Adams and Delia Sherman love the Restoration period
A conversation of history, inspiration, and collaborating on the first episode of Whitehall.
Liz Duffy Adams: I’m chatting with my co-writer, Delia Sherman, about how this all started for us. I first fell for the Restoration period long ago when I was a young acting student working on a scene from Congreve’s The Way of the World. I loved the wit, the heightened language, the sharpness of the characters and the sense that they felt deeply but carried it off with style. Years later, now a playwright, I wrote my neo-Restoration comedy Or, centered on the Restoration playwright Aphra Behn and her relationships with actress Nell Gwynne and King Charles II (among others). So one way and another I had gotten fairly steeped in the period, and when the question arose of doing a project for Serial Box I thought, what could be more fabulous than a story set in the Restoration? What about you, Delia; what was your relationship with the period?
Delia Sherman: When I was studying English drama in grad school, it was such a relief to climb out of the grim depths of Jacobean tragedy into the sparkling highlands of Restoration comedy. I loved the language and the characters and the serious social commentary lurking under the glittering wit — delivered by actual women playing women. And I was (and am, heaven help me) a total Cavalier. Lovelocks! Red heels and ribboned petticoat breeches! Dresses that didn’t stand up all by themselves! Swoony poetry! Being given a chance to write something written in this period, where art and music and science and architecture flourished and dramatic things happened very fast indeed, seemed like heaven to me. So when Liz asked me to be her co-writer, I said yes before she’d quite finished speaking. So, I was wondering — aside from Or, have you worked with this material before?
Liz: In the past few years I’ve experimented with writing some TV pilots, and one of them was about Catherine. I thought she’d make a great heroine for a historical series: Queen of England — and yet strangely overlooked. A fish-out-of-water situation is always interesting. How would she adapt to this incredibly different life? Having been brought up in immense seclusion, hardly ever leaving either the convent or the royal palace next door, in a loving family but a rather pious and formal court, she is sent all the way to England to marry the famously worldly Charles, and preside over a court second only to the French court in its pleasure-loving licentiousness — and no one had even thought it helpful for her to learn English! And of course, no sooner had she met Charles but she fell in love with him, and then was faced with the fact that there was already essentially a queen installed, his glamorous mistress the Countess of Castlemaine. Those are some dramatic obstacles. On top of that, her marriage was necessary to save her country — the English forces helping to fight back the Spanish who were keen to invade Portugal — so going home to Lisbon was never an option. She had to succeed as a queen and a wife. As it happened, before I’d really attempted to do anything with this TV pilot, Serial Box called, and so it became the spark behind our Whitehall. Have you ever written anything in the period before, Delia?
Delia: It’s about the only period I haven’t written in. Not quite true — I haven’t done Regency, either, barring an embarrassing epistolary Heyer pastiche I started with a friend in college. And I haven’t done a whole lot with the 20thcentury, either. I think I haven’t tackled the 17thcentury before because so much of the history I studied revolved around the English Civil War. What interests me as a writer is not the lives of the people who make History, but the lives of the people History happens to. I like to look closely at the magic (sometimes real, sometimes metaphorical) of daily life. Which, on one level, is what Whitehall is about. Yes, Catherine is Infanta of Portugal and Queen of England. But she’s also a frightened girl with a romantic, hopeful nature, considerable dignity, a very strong sense of responsibility, and very little practical experience of the world. I love Catherine. I even identify with her a little. Who is your favorite character?
Liz: Oh, what a hard question! I love Catherine, for all your reasons and also because she is good. It’s easy to find wicked characters sexy and exciting, and to think that goodness is dull, but I find goodness immensely appealing, particularly when it’s not easy. That said, I also adore Barbara Palmer, despite her not being particularly good at all! I admire her unapologetic sensuality, her wit, her absolute determination to not only thrive in a tricky situation but prevail and triumph! She’s just tremendous fun.
But then — another contender — I have always been rather in love with Charles, ever since I first started reading about him. He had every reason to be sour, bitter, and bloody-minded, given his history. And he was far from perfect. But he was just a fabulous, delightful person. Witty, pleasure loving but not (in my opinion) grossly so, as forgiving as he could be of the past, tolerant of religious differences, interested in women not simply in a womanizing way (though of course he had many lovers!) but as someone who sees them as people in their own right. He was emotionally complex, intellectually curious, restlessly physical, a lover and supporter of the arts and the sciences, and one of his best friends was his younger sister — how do you not love a man like that? Do you remember how we decided where to begin our story in Episode 1?
Delia: As I recall, we talked about starting it sooner, with Catherine being brought out of the convent and told she was going to marry Charles. Then I read an account of Catherine’s departure from Lisbon, taken from the journals of Lord Sandwich, who commanded the wedding fleet. Full of pageantry and colorful characters and grief and suspense, it was the perfect place to begin the story of Catherine’s outer and inner journeys from Portuguese princess to English queen.
Liz: Right, and then we wanted to get to England pretty quickly, and get the story started. And so we have. And on we go!
Originally published at blog.serialbox.com on May 20, 2016.
