A decanter to the skull. A gently spreading pool of blood beneath the body on the rug. The scream of a servant. A houseful of suspects assembles. We can only be watching an Agatha Christie.
WELCOME.
If Holy Week and the advent of spring seems like an odd time to give viewers the secular, murdery treat that is a Christie adaptation – this time of her 1958 story Ordeal By Innocence – well, that’s because it is.
The three-part mystery was supposed to follow in the footsteps of writer Sarah Phelps’ last two immaculate reworkings, And Then There Were None in 2015 and Witness for the Prosecution in 2016, and be the centrepiece of the 2017 Christmas schedule.
When one of the actors involved, Ed Westwick, became the subject of multiple historical sexual assault allegations, the decision was taken not to broadcast Ordeal By Innocence and to reshoot with a new actor, Christian Cooke.
The whole phalanx of actors – including Anna Chancellor as wealthy philanthropist and collector of waifs and strays Rachel Argyll (soon to have her skull decanted by the decanter); Bill Nighy as her widower Leo (soon to remarry with his frightful secretary Gwenda – played by Alice Eve, who at the last moment was unable to join them from the US and was split-screened in later); Morven Christie as the screaming servant; and Anthony Boyle as the apparent wielder of the fatal crystalware – reassembled in January and redid 35 scenes, with Cooke playing the volatile Mickey Argyll, one of Rachel’s multitudinous now-adult orphan charges, in 12 days.
If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t – a few stray icy breaths showing as they attempt to recreate a July setting in a Scottish location midwinter notwithstanding – be able to tell. The whole thing knits together seamlessly. It grabs you from the opening scenes, as Rachel is dispatched and Jack, always the most delinquent of her adopted children, is convicted – thanks to his fingerprints in her blood – of her murder despite his protestations of innocence. He is killed in prison.
So far so good. But half an arch won’t stand. Where is the rest of the premise?
A year later, as the family gathers at the ancestral home for Leo and Gwenda’s wedding and some illuminating flashbacks, it arrives. A nervous young stranger called Dr Arthur Calgary (a fine and unexpectedly moving, in Agatha’s customarily affectless world, performance by Luke Treadaway) turns up with a suitcase and a claim that he can alibi Jack.
The game, to quote Arthur Conan Doyle – the other master of detective fiction without whom neither the libraries nor TV schedules of England would long survive – is afoot.
Like Christie on one of her husband’s archeological digs, the next hour is spent sifting the mingled sands of truth and lies. Discrepancies in Arthur’s story are discovered to arise from self-protection, not fraudulence. Bitter divisions in the family (and eyebrow-raisingly strong bonds – yes, Mickey and adopted sister Tina, I’m looking at you) are gradually revealed – none deeper and more bitter than that between monstrous mother and children.
Rachel, it turns out via a combination of flashing glances, elliptical threats and above all, the simple sense of barely repressed fury rippling through every atom of Chancellor’s being, is A Piece of Work. We know not why – yet? – but she is the devil in disguise and has given just about everyone in Denouement Hall a reason to bump her off.
From now on, it’s just a matter of letting the danse macabre unfold. Phelps doesn’t get in the way of Christie’s careful choreography. However, she – and a uniformly brilliant cast that also boasts Matthew Goode as the supercilious Philip, who’s clearly an absolute shit (especially to his wife, cowed Argullian daughter Mary, played with brilliant brittleness by Eleanor Tomlinson), even before he was embittered by being paralysed in a drunken car accident – flesh out and strengthen Christie’s characters, whom she was frequently happy to leave as ciphers in the puzzle she was laying out to solve.
The latest adaptations, rich, dark, adult and drawing on a backdrop of postwar grief and instability, are a far cry from the sunny – still murderous, but sunny – uplands scattered with millet seed for Joan Hickson to peck at as Miss Marple or the light-filled art deco apartments in which the leetle grey cells of David Suchet’s Poirot could do their work.
The audience’s innocence has been too battered by the ordeals of the past few years, perhaps, for them to pass muster now. We get the Agatha Christie adaptations, we need, it seems – and, in the last three outings at least, better than we deserve.
