Outrageous, U&Drama review - skilfully-executed depiction of the notorious Mitford sisters

If somebody submitted a treatment for a new costume drama series set in the 1930s in which not just one but two fictitious sisters from a fading aristocratic family pair off with leading fascists, while the cousin warning them off these liaisons is a future British PM, the pitch meeting probably wouldn’t last that long. 

Yet Britbox’s Outrageous, a six-parter on the U+Drama channel, tells exactly this true extraordinary story, and tells it well. Even without the lavish budgets of other period projects, it looks the part, with spot-on interiors and costumes. It even gets to grip with the 1933 Nuremberg rally via a smartly edited montage of ecstatic shouting faces and stirring music, showing that you don’t need a stadium full of CGI Nazis to make you feel the weight of the history being presented.

Providing the tone of the piece as an intermittent narrator is the Mitford sister who became the most famous in the literary world, Nancy (Bessie Carter). She’s a sharp-tongued observer of the milieu of her own novels, romantically naive but politically astute and no fan of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), with whom her married sister Diana (Joanna Vanderham) becomes obsessed. When one of her younger sisters, the similarly smitten Unity (Shannon Watson, pictured below, centre, with Zoe Brough as Jessica and Orla Hill as Debo), decamps to Munich to be near her idol, one Adolf Hitler, Nancy balances this fervour with her own as a committed anti-fascist. An even more extreme left-winger is sister Jessica , whose fantasy is to join the communists, inspired by her renegade cousin Esmond Romilly, in fighting the forces of the far right in Spain.

Back at the family pile, the young women’s parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale (Jonathan Purefoy, pictured below right and Anna Chancellor), sit bemused, wondering how the “perfectly normal” upbringing they gave all their children had produced such a clan of rebels. The remaining two girls – sensible, horsey Pamela (Isobel Jesper Jones) and little fuzzy-haired Deborah (Orla Hill) – live rather less colourful lives, though we see Pamela casually steal Debo’s boyfriend; Debo will go on to become the Duchess of Devonshire.

The script, adapted by Sarah Williams from Mary S Lovell’s biography of the sisters, is cleverly crafted to avoid freighting the story with excess exposition; viz the first scene, in which a newspaper article read out satirically at the family’s breakfast table neatly fills in the basics about them. We are launched into Mitford-world, helped by occasional captions and a rolling timeline that locate the action in a time and place, ending in 1936 and the full stop in the sisters’ “lives as girls”.

The success of the series is partly down to its brilliant casting. Purefoy and Chancellor go far beyond the posh types they are often selected to play, both giving subtly detailed, poignant performances as the hapless, hopeless- with-money Redesdale and his weary but competent wife. Carter effortlessly travels from single bright young thing to cynical divorcee, while Vanderham is ideal as glacial blonde Diana, her unmoving, wide-eyed expressions suggesting a woman living behind a mask but secretly driven by lust and ambition.

The standout sister is Watson’s Unity, an ungainly girl with a high-pitched voice but a bizarre interior life and a will of steel. She believes school is just for boys, and her summation of the horrors of her coming-out ball is priceless. Touchingly stowed in her handbag is her pet rat. She delivers one of the best scenes, in which, wearing gym kit, she goes out onto Asthall’s vast lawn and does physical jerks to militaristic band music, a habit you assume she acquired in Munich, especially when she signs off the routine with a Sieg Heil salute.

How it came about that she and Diana allied themselves to one of the grimmest political movements in recent history is the elephant in the room. Diana (pictured left) married young (a Guinness), and two children later admits she is “bored". Unity, though, seems to be a fantasist who wants to escape her strict, dictatorial father for a more “electrifying" kind of autocrat. She gets a memorable to-camera speech, ostensibly addressing her parents, in which she guilelessly apologises for an anti-semitic rant she wrote as a letter to a German newspaper. Her defence, breathtakingly, is that in Germany, by now her home, her sentiments about the Jews were merely what everybody there thinks.

The script suggests that another source of Unity’s extremism was her desire to rise above the repressive mob of the Mitford sisters. Presumably this applied to all six of them, explaining why five of them went on to live unusual lives, even by today’s standards. Outrageous lives, too? The title isn’t undeserved, though has to be seen through the prism of the time, where scandals were far more toxic to the family brand. Still a lesson to us now is the sisters’ passion for personal liberty, which led them to rebellious stances that might have deprived others of theirs. It would be a shame if funding could not be found for a second series that laid out the bitter consequences of their choices.

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