Picture Drunk Succession and you’re on the right path.
Steven Knight’s thing is Maximalist History. Sure, he dabbles in other areas – he’s working on the next James Bond film, for one thing – but his calling card is big, bombastic, histrionic stories pulled from the annals of Things That Actually Happened and then run though a process of fictionalisation. How much fictionalisation varies.
It’s a good trick and one more writers should learn – you’ll never invent anything stranger or more lurid than what real people have done to each other, so you might as well hit the books. Knight’s latest foray into the history stacks has produced House Of Guinness, a lusty, sumptuous, violent account of a key period in the history of the Guinness Brewing Company. Like Peaky Blinders, Taboo, SAS: Rogue Heroes, and A Thousand Blows, it’s big, ballsy, sexy, and engrossing. It might even be true. Well, in the broad strokes.
It’s 1868 and Benjamin Guinness, patriarch of the Anglo-Irish Guinness family whose name adorns the brewery that brought them wealth, has turned up his toes. His four children await the division of his estate. Eldest son Arthur (Anthony Boyle) returns to Dublin after years in London to split the lion’s share with ambitious youngest son Edward (Louis Partridge), who’s been running the brewery for years and has plans to expand exports to the US. Meanwhile, their sister Anne (Emily Fairn) gets nothing, while rakehell middle child Ben (Fionn O’Shea) is palmed off with a stipend, which won’t be enough to clear his considerable gambling debts to menacing crime lord Bonnie Champion (David Wilmot).
Which is enough already for a kind of beery Succession: The Victorian Age without throwing in the Fenians (the proto-IRA, sort of), already angered by the Guinness family’s ties to the UK, seeking to blackmail them over Arthur’s homosexuality – which Knight does. This unleashes brewery foreman/chief legbreaker Rafferty (James Norton, clearly enjoying himself). It’s interesting to note that at this stage of the game the Guinness family were fairly staunch Unionists, which is the kind of historical detail that tends to get lost in wash thanks to modern brand management.
Knight loves that kind of detail – and he loves finding gaps in the record to invent more-or-less plausible drama. The jury is out on the historical Arthur’s sexuality, but imagining his queerness gets us a wonderfully saucy scene where he negotiates a marriage of convenience with Danielle Galligan’s hilariously blunt Lady Olivia Hedges-White (the real life couple were childless, for what it’s worth). Elsewhere, Game Of Thrones‘ Jack Gleeson makes a meal out of the role of roguish Guinness by-blow Byron Hedges, who liaises with diaspora Fenians in New York to smooth the brew’s pathway to market.
It’s all evocatively designed and gorgeously staged, for all that the partisan politics are murky. The occasional sidebar to address the plight of tenant farmers doesn’t really counterbalance the sheer decadent glamour of the Guinness dynasty’s drama. still, the working floor of the brewery looks enough Hell to remind us that these people we’re following are not much more than well-dressed demon princes. t’s an avenue that ought to be further explored if the much-teased second season ever arrives. Not that you should take your political cues from pop culture – not all of them, at least. Still, even if this eight episode season is all we get, House Of Guinness is a top notch historical soap opera. Pretty great soundtrack, too:
House Of Guinness is streaming on Netflix now.
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