'The Devil's Whore' - An English revolution

Roundheads and cavaliers... class warfare... regicide... families at one another's throats... an explosion of radical ideas... You'd think that the English Civil War would be meat and drink to any half-sentient dramatist.

But think again, for while across our screens flounce no end of Henry VIIIs and Elizabeth Is, the revolution that saw a monarch beheaded and long-oppressed subjects daring to dream of equality has largely been ignored.

But that's all about to change with Peter Flannery's four-part civil war drama The Devil's Whore, which stars John Simm, Andrea Riseborough and Michael Fassbender, and begins on Channel 4 next week. This is a full-blooded epic that's greedy for the history overlooked by so many others.

"I was astonished when I got into the period how ignorant we are about it," says Flannery. "Except by Marxist writers, it's hardly even referred to as a 'revolution', but it becomes clear very quickly that it was the first of the revolutions, which paved the way for the French and American revolutions.

"I don't know why we're shy about it," he continues. "There must be something in the English temperament that says revolutions are for Johnny Foreigner. Why did Dickens write a novel about the French Revolution and not the English Revolution? Shakespeare died too early. He would have written a great play about it and taken similar liberties with the facts as I have."

Flannery wouldn't compare himself to Shakespeare, but he did give us that landmark British TV drama Our Friends in the North in 1996, which was adapted from his 1982 RSC play. More than eight hours long, it took four friends in 1960s Tyneside, and followed them through the personal and political upheavals of the subsequent decades. It's a framework that Flannery has recycled in The Devil's Whore.

"It was a very conscious similarity. In fact, for a long time, we called it Our Friends in the Civil War," Flannery jokes. "I wanted to create a group of people whom we would follow through the events, following their lives as well as their politics. The main difference is that in Our Friends in the North, the characters were wholly fictional. Here only one of them is fictional."

That fictional character is the one so charmingly referred to in the title, a spirited aristocratic woman called Angelica Fanshawe, whose dawning political awareness is followed through the first stirrings of discontent, war, regicide and beyond into the sectarian politics of Cromwell's junta. The name Angelica is misplaced, since she has been prone to visions of a leering Satan ever since she threw her Bible into the mud after being abandoned as a girl by her religious-maniac mother. "She's a woman not of her time, in the sense that she's unapologetically brave and sexual and forward-thinking and ballsy and intelligent," says Riseborough, the actress who plays her. "She's a real sexually charged, beautifully vivid spirit unable to be chained down."

It's the second outspoken, ballsy screen heroine on the trot for Riseborough, last seen as a young Margaret Thatcher in BBC4's The Long Walk to Finchley. For The Devil's Whore, Riseborough says she "digested a mountain of stuff. Antonia Fraser and her fantastic book about women in the 17th century. Alison Plowden's Henrietta Maria. Pauline Gregg's King Charles I. Tristram Hunt's very good on the English Civil War, too."

Simm has also been doing research. "I buriedmyself in books to get a feel of the time," he says. "There's a brilliant book called The English Civil War: at First Hand, which is letters written back from the front." Although, unlike Angelica, his character, Edward Sexby, really existed (he was one of the proto-Marxist reformers known as the Levellers, and went on to try to assassinate Cromwell), Simm's Sexby is largely a fictional creature. Indeed, he could have stepped out of a Sergio Leone Western with his wide-brimmed black hat and scarred face.

"It's Indiana Jones with knobs on," he says. "Sexby's a kind of anti-hero, which I like best. When you first meet him, he's a soldier of fortune. And then he falls in love with Angelica and the Parliamentarian philosophy. He changes sides on the battlefield."

Oliver Cromwell is played by Dominic West. "My mum is Irish and still isn't speaking to me. My wife-to-be is Irish. He's not a popular figure over there," West says.

Fassbender, having just played Bobby Sands in Hunger, and having grown up in the Republic (although his parents are German), also had hostile preconceptions about Cromwell. "I was aware of the destruction, the way he laid waste to Ireland," says Fassbender, who plays Thomas Rainsborough, the Parliamentarian ally of Cromwell, whose politics gradually become too radical for the Lord Protector. "Rainsborough felt every man should have the vote and everybody should be free, and should have a say in the running of their country. Cromwell thought that was crazy."

But it's a royalist character who provides the most gloriously unexpected performance in The Devil's Whore, and Peter Capaldi as Charles I is a wonder. "What a performance," says Flannery. "I was bowled over by it." Capaldi himself says: "There were a couple of days where I thought, 'This is why I got into acting.'"

One of those days was filming Charles I's execution scene. "I'd never had my head on a chopping block before," says Capaldi. "It starts to choke you, the weight of your head pressing against your throat even before the axe comes down. Somebody shot the scene on their mobile phone, and there was this bizarre digital footage of a 17th-century event, and it was powerful, like some terrible thing posted on the internet."

A potentially just as jarring juxtaposition comes from a fact that has been exercising the media ever since Channel 4 originally announced the project, and that was the location. Civil War Oxfordshire was filmed entirely on location in South Africa, and the press didn't like it one bit. Flannery says they have his sympathy.

"When they said they were going to recce for locations in South Africa, I was horrified. But they showed me the locations and I was completely won over: entire oak valleys of the kind you wouldn't find in England any more. And no electricity pylons or planes flying overhead. Mind you, we had to rely on CGI to take out the mountains."

The shoot lasted three and a half months, but The Devil's Whore had taken more than 14 years to get to that stage. "Exactly the same amount of time it took Our Friends in the North to finally get filmed," says Flannery. "My co-writer, the Oxford historian Martine Brant, had the original idea. She was working on a thesis at the time about wicked women of the 17th century, and Tessa Ross, then at the BBC but now at Channel 4, teamed us up, and we spent the whole of 1994 travelling across England in Cromwell's footsteps."

Flannery also took the time to read the Bible. "It was my first port of call for the language of the day," he says. "I annotated the King James Bible for myself. That's the book they mostly had in common, and those who couldn't read were having it read to them all the time. All the imagery and their way of expression came from it.

"After I'd researched it for a year, it was commissioned as an eight-part serial, and I wrote the first two episodes, but it was expensive and the BBC lost faith in it. It stayed in limbo for years. I thought about writing it as a trilogy for the RSC, but then Ross found herself at Channel 4 and asked me what I would most like to do, and I said it was still The Devil's Whore. 'Fine,' she said. 'You'll get so many millions of pounds to do it, and it has to be a maximum of four hours.'"

Brant based her thesis on the gallows speeches of 17th-century women hanged at Tyburn. "They were hanged for often petty offences," she says. "Most of them were pitifully misunderstood and persecuted for not conforming to a patriarchal system. I live in a 16th-century house just outside Oxford where Cromwell stayed during the siege of Oxford and I became fascinated by the idea of a nobly born woman in the Civil War who stepped outside the conventions of her estate and found her own voice amid the chaos of the English revolution."

Both Brand and Flannery stress the importance of these tumultuous years to our basic civil rights, liberties currently in danger of erosion. Says Brant: "We have a collective amnesia today about these transformational years in which our basic liberties were won: the sovereignty of Parliament, freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, religious toleration... in short, freedom from tyranny."

Flannery continues the theme. "All those ideas from the Civil War survived. In Chartism, in votes for women, all sorts of things... even bringing in decimal coinage, which was suggested at the time. We have been done a disservice by being told that this period was an interregnum, that the world went wrong for 10 years and then was put right again when the King came back. Actually, it was the most exciting political time in our history."

'The Devil's Whore' begins on Wednesday at 9pm on Channel 4

HOW THE CIVIL WAR HAS BEEN DRAMATISED

Cromwell (1970)
One of the most exciting periods in our history turned into an overlong bore. The counter-intuitive casting didn't help, with hell-raiser Richard Harris as the Puritan disciplinarian Cromwell and the fastidious Alec Guinness as the flamboyant King Charles I.

To Kill a King (2003)
The casting (Tim Roth as a Tarantinoesque Cromwell and Rupert Everett acting up a storm as a foppish King Charles I) makes more sense here, and there's a brave stab at the political complexities, but this look at the four years leading up to King Charles's execution drags long before the axe comes down.

Witchfinder General (1968)
The extraordinary final film of the talented 23-year-old wunderkind Michael Reeves (who died of a drug overdose before its release) was evocatively shot in an autumnal Suffolk. A bleak and brutal cult classic starring Vincent Price as a pious Civil war opportunist finding Catholic witches among the peasantry.

The Moonraker (1958)
This lively British costume drama realised the Civil War's swashbuckler potential. Long before his Inspector Wexford years, George Baker leapt about the screen as the eponymous royalist fugitive. It also boasts the most unlikely of all screen Cromwells: John le Mesurier.

By the Sword Divided (1983)
Until 'The Devil's Whore', this has been television's only concerted stab at dramatising the revolution, using that staple of the TV soap opera: families at war with themselves. The royalist Lacey family is split when the eldest daughter marries a Parliamentarian.

Blackadder: the Cavalier Years (1998)
This 1988 Comic Relief Special casts Stephen Fry as a King Charles I whom Van Dyck would have struggled to recognise, but with Warren Clarke rather more persuasive as Cromwell.