Could she have clubbed Mrs Emily French to death with the candlestick? I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out she was capable of murder herself. Why has she deserted him? Was she lying before, or is she lying now? Andrea Riseborough’s Romaine was always dead behind the eyes, punished too much by life perhaps, but by the end of the episode she was a sadist, enjoying the torment of Leonard and the poor romantic Mayhew. She spat in his face, and left us all hanging too. At first she was tenderly sitting close to Leonard in his cell, and then – she said one word to him. Romaine’s decision to retract her alibi and instead become a witness for the prosecution happened in a heartbeat. In any case, the writing (by Sarah Phelps, who previously adapted And Then There Were None for the BBC last Christmas) does a sterling job of balancing our interest in the crime with the establishment of the characters, until we get to the tipping point of the last ten minutes of this first part, and the murder mystery kicked up a gear to grab my attention fully. Maybe that’s the joy of adapting a short story rather than a novel not so many elements need to be sacrificed in order to chew through the pages.
Yes, pretty much all the big themes got touched upon, and there was no great rush to move the plot along at breakneck speed. It was a reflective, solemn approach to material that could have been portrayed as titillating and it reflected not only upon time, and how it changes us, but also on class, and war, and money, and love, and cruelty. I’m so glad we were given time for such revealing details, and to build character in a such a way.
Then it was over, and he collapsed into sobbing that he couldn’t control. As she sang the pain and grief left his features, and transformed him utterly. Toby Jones as John Mayhew (the ill, suffering solicitor who takes on Leonard’s case) sat in the dark in the theatre watching Romaine perform an old romantic song. There wasn’t anybody who was less than absolutely great in their role, but one moment in particular stuck with me. So it was a good thing that all the actors were just so strong in it – this approach might not have worked otherwise.
0 kommentar(er)
