It is, though, silent apart from the tick of a clock, the scrape of a chair or the aforementioned loudly squeaking marital bed. The house never seems oppressive in itself, only in the way that Katherine is confined to it by the men who try to control her. It is light-painted and even the heavy mahogany furniture cannot stop the bleached daylight seeping through the doors and windows. The house itself is large and Victorian and rather empty, though it never seems gloomy (though this could be because I grew up in an echoey Victorian house in the North East of England). Far more shocking are the scenes where the middle aged Alexander makes his young wife remove her virginal nightdress and stand naked in the cold bedroom while he remains fully clothed – a classic misogynistic power play and very unsettling to watch. After all what do two young people in love and lust do in an otherwise empty house? Even I can remember that, and I’m almost the Victorian nightgown-wearing generation. There is nudity though weirdly not as much as I was expecting, or maybe it didn’t really register because it seemed so natural, like the frequent sex. When Katherine isn’t striding the moors or sitting primly on her sofa, she and Sebastian are having lots of noisy sex on the world’s squeakiest bed. Though in other scenes, her hair intricately plaited by her maid, her dress constrictingly modest but showing off her tiny corseted waist, she seems old and sad beyond her years. Katherine is very young – sometimes she looks about 16 in her buttoned-to-the-neck white nightgown with her hair glossily cascading all the way down her back. As people start to talk, and her position is made clear, an ever-deepening spiral of violence and death takes hold. Soon she meets the new young groom, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), and there’s an instant attraction which leads quickly to a passionately frenzied affair, obvious to everyone around them. But as soon as colliery business takes the two men away she is invigorated – out walking on the hills, hair loose, corset-less, a blanket round her shoulders. Everyone is conspiring to keep her indoors, and she spends most of her time in a state of enervation – looking out of her bedroom window, or sitting on the sofa in front of the unlit fire. Katherine (Florence Pugh) and her husband, the much older colliery owner Alexander (Paul Hilton), live with his brutish father Boris (Christopher Fairbank) and a few servants in an echoey Victorian pile on the Northumbrian moors. Having said that it’s still possible to sympathise with her predicament if not the appalling wickedness of her methods, trapped as she is by her time, her sex and her class. New bride Katherine (who has been effectively sold to her husband’s family) is much more in control than her Shakespearean namesake, and more ruthless, always crushing any trace of empathy or maternal instinct that might appear. It is also a not-very-cautionary tale about power, including the power of silence. Lady Macbeth certainly isn’t a Victorian morality play but you could probably call it a Victorian intersectionality play.
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