Tonight:
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Fiona Mountford's rating
The House of Special Purposes lacks sense of impending peril
By
Fiona Mountford
6 Jul 2009
We all know what happened to the Romanov family — the deposed Tsar and Tsarina, plus their children — in the titular Ekaterinburg location in 1918 but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a fine drama to be made out of the months of their imprisonment.
Heidi Thomas, that skilled television writer of Lilies and Cranford, is adept at providing rich characterisation in just a few lines, which allows us to bond in particular with the adolescent Romanov daughters, as they strike up tentative intimacies with their captors.
What’s lacking, though, from both Thomas’s writing and Howard Davies’s fluid direction, is any real sense of impending peril. The Romanovs’ world effectively ended with the Russian Revolution, yet the lack of urgency the stoical family displays suggests they’re in a jolly summer camp, rather than the furthest ante-room of the last-chance saloon. A more acute sense of the political turmoil unfolding outside would also be welcome.
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