RIVALS Season 2 lulls you in with its standard fare – two male full frontals in the first 15 minutes, a will-they-won’t-they between Freddie and Lizzie, a tryst outside a pub – all the better to shatter your heart in Episode 6.
Two extraordinary pieces of screenwriting, both by Laura Wade, frame the first half of Season 2. The first comes in Episode 2: a comedy-of-errors scene shot in one take, where Wade’s playwright credentials shine.
The who's-who of Rutshire passes through Sarah Stratton’s kitchen as she throws a dinner, secretly catered by Agatha (Taggie) O’Hara, to support her husband’s political campaign. Secrets will come out – Sarah's inability to cook, her many affairs, her unwanted pregnancy – but first she needs to manage all her guests through a carefully orchestrated choreography of doors, pantries and half-truths. That scene walks a harried line between being hilarious for the audience and incredibly stressful for Sarah. One wrong door opened, and the life she has carefully constructed could come crashing down.
Emily Atack portrays Sarah, one of the ensemble’s most tragic characters, with real empathy. Before Season 1 begins, Sarah has gone from mistress to Tory MP Paul Stratton to his wife. Sarah is ambitious, smart and shrewd, but that ambition, combined with a lack of self-confidence, leads to poor decisions. She believes – and the patriarchy reinforces - that her value lies in how good in bed she is, and that she can only advance in her professional and personal lives by sleeping with men.
Rivals is a riot of a show, each episode more entertaining than the last. It also hides, under brightly coloured dresses, free-flowing champagne and sex, a dark undercurrent. This is the late 1980s, after all, when Margaret Thatcher’s policies were trickling down to a more unequal Britain. The hedonism and hunger are about more than money, power, pleasure, and the occasional Yeats poem – a fear of death runs through it all, crystallising in Episode 6, the other highlight of the season.
Episode 6 is a pressure-cooker episode, set to the howling of a growing hurricane. It opens on Caitlyn and Archie’s first time – a sweet, slightly awkward scene that perfectly captures teenage love and lust. Standard Rivals, except it’s lit with a doomed black-and-red colour palette and haunted, for the viewer, by Chekhov’s photo of Caitlyn’s mother and Archie’s father post-coital, which Archie has just unknowingly developed. Wade gives us a sense of impending disaster, then takes us to its logical end: the death of Monica, a beloved character, just as she revisits her teenage feelings for Dame Enid and finally prepares to leave her bad Baddingham of a husband, Tony. “Why can’t we find the courage to change things?” she asks a few hours before being crushed in her car.
Claire Rushbrook is fantastic as Monica, making the most of Wade’s tight, restrained script which sizzles over a few, mostly table-based scenes. A lot of the episode happens in looks and strained breathing, rather than characters spelling out everything they feel. Just as Monica tells Lizzie she wishes she’d lived a less timid life, Episode 6 will have you wondering what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life. I’m curious to see how this ripples through Rutshire as the characters grapple with her death.
I am particularly interested to know what this does to Taggie, the one character the writers and showrunners don’t seem to know what to do with. Now 21, Taggie runs a catering business, though the way everyone talks about it, she’s less entrepreneur and more maid to the county’s gentry. She is housekeeper and cook to her family. All of this takes real skills, which neither the show nor its characters give her enough credit for. Taggie is consistently portrayed as a klutz, as if being bad at things was integral to her personality. The inciting incident for the kitchen scene in Episode 2 is Taggie dropping so much salt into a daube that it becomes inedible. Why? Because Rupert was opening a Waitrose on TV, and she was mesmerised – so naturally, Rupert has to come and save her.
Rivals is one of those rare shows that improves on its source material, but with Taggie and Rupert, it is boxed into a corner, as they need to end up together unless the show is willing to swerve from Jilly Cooper’s Chronicles. Right now, it’s hard to know why Taggie is into Rupert, a man who sexually harassed her, or why Rupert is into Taggie, a woman 20 years his junior, aside from the usual creepy older-man reasons.
In one of the few scenes Monica and Taggie shared, the older woman warned her, “Be careful, Agatha, you’re in danger of developing a backbone.” I like to think it’s a lesson Taggie will hold on to in Monica’s memory.
Support our work
You can subscribe to the OBSCURAE newsletter for free, or become a paid Aficionado for £5/month to help fund independent coverage, contributor fees, site hosting, and admin costs.