Writer and Director: Vibeke Idsøe
It hasn’t always gone to plan when members of the Royal Family marry outside of their ennobled state with women – always women – first hounded for daring to dream of losing their commoner status and then, in the case of Anne Boleyn, her head, while more recent members have resigned the family and their position to pursue love away from the existing strictures of royal life. And it is not just in the UK where such relationships have challenged protocol with Vibeke Idsøe dramatising the romanticised connection between Sonja Haraldsen, a spirited shop-owner’s daughter, and Crown Prince Harald of Norway in the 1950s and 1960s, coming to Viaplay as a four-part series. The Commoner: A Royal Dilemma may be predictable period drama but it is honest about the challenges of a real-life happy ending when the world seems against it.
Meeting by chance at a mutual friend’s dinner party shortly after Sonja’s father dies, meeting Prince Harald projects her into an unexpectedly scandalous, long-running and much debated connection. With both told by friends and family to forget the affair, particularly as the King would like Harald to ally himself with a Greek princess, the shy couple continue to meet in secret and soon fall in love. But can they overcome their differences in rank and media disapproval?
The Commoner doesn’t have quite the same budget as a Netflix mega-show but this drama in the style of The Crown does manage to pull off the sense of grand and ancient monarchy in stately homes, living a formal public life while trying to manage ordinary human emotions and needs. It also captures the freshness of youth in post-war Europe embracing the 1950s and 1960s aesthetic, continually underscored by the new American music of the era as a lightness pushes back against the stuffy traditionalism that keep Harald and Sonja apart for so long. And there is much to enjoy in the visual design and costumes as the informalities and possibilities emerge for each of the characters and for Norway in a period of key social change.
The central relationship is very sweet, two introverted and decent people who develop a genuine connection and start to bring out more confidence in one another – perfect for its Valentine’s Day release in the UK. Naturally the bulk of the story beyond Episode One’s meet-cute is dedicated to overcoming those obstacles centred around Sonja’s birth, yet with Harald’s sister wanting to marry a divorced man, the feelings of a monarchy pushed to modernise is well done. And although it is never explicit – in spite of a fun cameo or two from a young Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother – this follows in the wake of Princess Margaret’s derailed hopes to do the same.
Sindre Strand Offerdal as Harald is awkward and unsure, not great at speaking in public or when to make a move on Sonja but over many years he becomes more determined and charmingly insistent on seeing her in spite of the tidal wave of opinion – Strand Offerdal does conflicted very well. Gina Bernhoft Gørvell as Sonja is far livelier and they are very likeable together, particularly as she proves practical and capable from the start, much more than a simpering wannabe princess, but is equally wounded by the unjustified strength of feeling against her.
Of course, it is easy to look back in retrospect and see the blindness of nations who prevented royalty marrying for love, including our own, but The Commoner lays out the complication of living through it while giving you plenty of reasons to hope that a happy ending is worth waiting for.
The Commoner: A Royal Dilemma airs in the UK on 11 February on Viaplay available as an Amazon Prime Video Channels add on.
