The London she moved through was – it was suggested – both a physical and a moral maze, a warren of squalid streets marked by odd visions: a grubby angel with swan's wings on his back, a crow-headed figure, a dying horse down on the cobbles. Things were just as feverish inside too, as the whore hero of this Victorian pastiche threaded her way past piglets and obese slatterns and pissing doxies to discover a friend dying, savagely beaten by her latest clients.
And yes, it looked fabulous. This is London, 1874, as if Vogue had decided that Victorian underbelly was going to be this season's big thing. Marc "The Devil's Whore/The Mark of Cain" Munden's extraordinary direction ensured we were discombobulated from the get-go. Everything looked as if it had been smeared with goose fat, then dunked in soot, and had then half-fallen over, like a drunk in a telephone booth. There were odd angles and seasick cellos. They'd even got a madly cackling old man to decorate one of the street scenes – a popular gothic accessory that you can normally take as evidence of failure of imagination but somehow seemed to fit here. Abandon hope all ye who entered in search of a simple, sugar-dusted treat to tide ye over until the next series of Downton Abbey. Here, it seemed to say, is a costume drama as snug as a steel corset.
Yet all of 19th-century literary trope-life is present. As well as the fascinating lady of the night, we have a disappointing son disinherited by his father, a wife slipping slowly into insanity (though she has not yet been banished to the attic, her inability to survive supper without falling into a frothing fit on the carpet surely bodes ill), a predatory doctor, a pious Gladstonian brother with a growing interest in London's underworld and a ministering angel in black bombazine – but stirred with a dirty great postmodern stick so we get to see all the sex too.
Adapted by writer Lucinda Coxon from Michel Faber's 2002 novel, episode one lifted its nightie to reveal a world in which life is cheap, sanity is tenuous, sexual skullduggery is rife, and one's position in society is as unsteady as the pustular dandies who wobble boozily through the honking corridors of Mrs Castaway (Gillian Anderson)- the sub-Dickensian grotesque who runs the brothel at which Sugar works.
Amid the woozy, widdly squalor, the plot staggered in and out of focus. Semolina-faced autodidact Sugar channelled her vast intelligence and broiling hatred of men into her novel-in-progress, whiling away the hours between clients by penning murderous fantasies about them. "It's a book of HATE," she snapped at a friend, as they ate cream buns in the park. "To wreak revenge on every pompous, trembling worm who taps at Mrs Castaway's door."
Across town, and several miles up the social ladder, potato-bonced William Rackham (Chris O'Dowd) is heir to a perfume business but distracted by writerly aspirations, and desperately seeking to placate his furious father. Upstairs his tremulous, housebound wife Agnes spends her time whacking at in-laws' fascinators with a poker and being felt up by Richard E Grant's repellent physician. Dowd nicely caught the absurdity of a man trapped between affectations of bohemianism and feeble attempts at Victorian mastery. William fancies himself as a man and an intellectual, but he's not really either. He is, instead, just the right mixture of haplessness, selfishness and vulnerability to make him perfect prey for a bright prostitute with an eye on the main chance.
Seeking relief from his debts and his neurasthenic wife he finds Sugar, who's received a glowing write-up ("They say she never disappoints …") in a gentlemen's guide to London's sexual underworld. And when he discovers that Sugar can talk arty with the best of them – she scornfully dismisses Ruskin as a "major minor" in verse – he's lost. In a pub, they discussed Tennyson and Arnold. Then, stifling sniggers, she gave him a blow job. "Ho! Hah! HAAAHRRNNNNG!" he roared, enormous legs pedalling the air as if it was an upside-down sex tricycle. Reinvigorated, Rackham scampered home to sort out his wonga. "I am ushering in a new regime!" he boomed, hurtling through his accounts in the manner of a tumescent bowling ball as his terrified maids cowered behind the nearest antimacassar.
Later, while William is going at her from behind, yodelling with sexual release, Sugar is busy rifling through his coat pockets for useful intelligence. A few hurried searches through his briefcase later and Sugar is soon advising him about business plans, amending advertising copy and generally making herself indispensable in ways outside the traditional remit. Soon Daddy has restored his allowance, William is paying for "exclusive patronage" to Sugar and she is on the verge of being installed in some pseudo-official capacity in his house.
As Sugar parlays sex into success, William's poor wife (another great performance, this time from Amanda Hale) is sliding deeper into madness, thanks to her sexually abusive doctor. She writes too, though rarely more than a few words. She wrote "Help" in her own breath on the window and "Must get out" in her diary, as the sinister Dr Curlew turns up now and then to terrify her by doing something unspeakably clinical under her petticoats.
The episode ended on a particularly bleak note. Sugar made a clandestine reconnaissance mission to the Rackhams' enormous house, culminating with her admiring discovery of just how far beyond his means he's been living. "You'll keep me better than you do now," she breathed. Meanwhile, watching from the bedroom was a pallid, nightie-bound Agnes. "My angel!" she gasped, peering at the gawping Sugar below while clawing at the windowpane: an image so tragic, so heavy with impending awfulness, you could probably hear the resulting outbreak of facepalms from Neptune. There is a kind of nightmarish glamour to the whole thing, a weird, off-kilterish feeling against which refreshing scenes of prostitutes remaining preoccupied with their own survival and nursing diaries full of vengeance sit well, and suggest a story and an execution that will yet come to bite complacent viewers firmly on the ass. More laudanum, please.
Television Series: The Crimson Petal and the White (S01E01)
Release Date: April 2011
Actress: Romola Garai
Video Clips Credit: Zorg
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