Great Catherine: Whom Glory Still Adores

About the show

The plot focuses on Captain Charles Edstaston, a very prim and proper British military attaché who, in 1776, is assigned to the Imperial Russian court in Saint Petersburg, during the 34-year (1762–1796) rule of Empress Catherine the Great, and brings his equally prim fiancée, Claire, with him. In the midst of court intrigue and palace politics, primarily instigated by Catherine's favored statesman and military leader, the drunken, ill-mannered, but crafty Prince Patiomkin, the imperiously commanding, yet concurrently, voraciously intimate Catherine toys with the naive arrival, questioning his rigid beliefs, leading him to drop his guarded mannerisms and, in the process, she also learns certain philosophical truths.