Bedroom Games SEX AND POWER IN THE FAVOURITE

Towards the conclusion of The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), Lady Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), remarks to her cousin, Abigail Masham, nee Hill (Emma Stone), ‘We were playing very different games.’ This remark is not entirely true. Sarah has fallen out of favour with Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), despite her long-time status as the British monarch’s closest confidant and political adviser. Meanwhile, Abigail has ascended from the scullery, securing a noble marriage to Colonel Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn) and £2000 a year on her way up. Sarah, who has been close to Anne since they were girls, has lost her place as the queen’s ‘favourite’ to a woman unafraid to ‘act in a way that meets with the edges of [her] morality’. To make that point violently clear, Abigail has gone so far as to poison Sarah to try to get her out of the way.

Sarah and Abigail are enemies, but they are not so different. Each has done what they deem necessary in order to survive the brutal manoeuvres of eighteenth-century court life. For Abigail, who has ‘fallen far’ (she arrives at the palace face-down in the mud), the stakes are especially high. Abigail comes from a merchant family whose fortune was lost because of her father’s gambling; as she explains to Sarah, when she was fifteen, her father ‘lost’ her in a card game to an older man. Both Sarah and Abigail play games with each other, with Anne and with the men around them – not for fun, but because surviving as a woman in eighteenth-century England demands it.

Lanthimos offers a complex version of the ‘strong female character’ trope by reminding us that these women, especially Anne and Abigail, are actually very vulnerable, and not able to be