It’s the 17th century! It’s Norton Folgate! It’s Andy! It’s a…rom com?!

This is my first experience of Bethany Weimers’ direction and it won’t be the last. This sort of story demands a very specific tone and lightness of touch to land and Weimers takes a cast full of big personalities and big ideas and spins it through a dizzyingly fun, frantic run time that still gives every cast member room in the spotlight.

The obvious question here is if Norton and Andy are fun as they always are and, of course, the answer is ‘YES’. In this instance it’s ‘Yes’ spelled out in the wreckage of Norton’s latest good time. Samuel Barnett is always great and his cheerful embodiment of joie de vivre gets to have a great time here. Norton is adept at making his own fun and he gets to have a lot of it here. James Goss’ script cleverly plays off the time to craft a B plot that’s really very sweet. Sexual identity and the discovery of who you are is, turns out, still possible in the 17th century. It just needs rather more of a run up.

Andy meanwhile continues to be my favourite Torchwood character. The series’ emergency normal person is such a good dude and has absolutely no measure of luck at all. The genius of the character, and how Tom Price plays him, is that Andy isn’t a victim. He’s never the punch line, never Homer Simpson with a warrant card. Instead, he’s the audience insert. A sensible, kind, dogged man doing his best. Even if his best happens to be talking down the living embodiment of No Impulse Control while being an oddly plausible period romantic lead.

The supporting cast are just as good and having just as much of a good time. Shai Matheson and George Naylor are incredibly good fun as the opposite ends of the suitor spectrum. They both go very very big but the story calls for it and their colossal performances do a neat job of balancing Andy’s perennial terror and Norton’s ebullience.

But the secret MVP here is Ebony Jonelle as Catherine de Winter. Catherine is the still point around which this storm of libidos, testosterone and doublets orbits. She’s calm in the way that people who are under constant pressure are calm, wry when she can be and sees everything. Her scenes with Andy are by far the most fun scenes of a story made entirely of fun scenes and the double act they have is the equal of the Norton/Andy Show. I hope we meet her again. I suspect Andy does too.

Verdict: Lightly seasoned with a very interesting audio cameo from a carefully unnamed character, this is a breezy, fun, cheerfully bawdy romp. Great fun from start to finish. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

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