Gunpowder is a television miniseries about British activist Guy Fawkes and a group of provincial English Catholics plan to blow up the House of Lords and kill King James I in the early 17th century.
It’s always the dialogue I like most in these period films and television shows, where people talk with surgically sharp elocution and stinging barbs, no matter the story or outcome. It’s really perhaps the reason most that Gunpowder works so well, though granted, those that deliver these lines make it all the more delicious. History be damned, the fun is in the drama and laser-cut execution where the complications of a troubled time in English past is all the stage.
The three-part series begins a bit like Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, where a villain makes entrance to a home keeping a few hunted souls in hiding. That villain is Sir William Wade (Shaun Dooley) – working for the equally menacing Lord Robert Cecil (Mark Gatiss), who reports to even worse – looking for Catholics, meeting Robert Catesby (Kit Harington) in defense of those safe from his wrath, hoping he and his cronies are unable to find the priests and followers sheltered in the walls and hollows of furniture. It’s a tense few minutes, setting the stage for rampant persecution and zero mercy.
From here, the verbal violence shifts to that of something much more physical as the hangings, disembowelments, and more push the graphic envelope with searing and disturbing accuracy. Meanwhile, the politics play out, hammering home how power corrupts and those with it remain blinded by its fervor.
Catesby is a widower, still reeling from the loss of his wife, wedged in the middle of the struggle, dealing with his religiousness and the fight to protect those longing to be free of oppression. If you know anything of the real Gunpowder Plot of 1605, it’s probably because of the name Guy Fawkes, the most memorable of the men under Catesby’s mission to assassinate King James I and upset the prevailing rules.
The series explores the plight and motivations of Cateby and his many setbacks and suffering, keeping his fight the honorable one as the royal and political machinations around him kindle and ignite, leaving him no choice it appears than to take up arms. In this are others, including Anne Vaux (Liv Tyler), his cousin who is harassed and smeared, a target as well feel great empathy for. There is also Robert (Tom Sweet), Catesby son, a relationship that challenges both. And of course Guy Fawkes (Tom Cullen) himself, a shadowy figure often undefined, his stature and legend so secure with modern audiences, he takes on a kind of ethereal displacement.
Gundpowder is an intriguing and well-crafted enterprise, co-written and produced by Karrington, he an actual direct descendent of the man he plays in the series, making this an obvious passion project of which he fully commits. While sometimes hard to watch, it brutal and uncompromising attention to torture and death lending it a dark edge, there is a tremendous sense of presence and authenticity in the story as well. These were harrowing times for certain and to think of the horrors made in the name of faith (that still divides so many), Gunpowder is at its minimum a sobering reflection of a dark chapter we must never forget.