A portrait of absurdity
THE sleuth who does not want the case is a fictional figure almost as commonplace as the sleuth who is obsessed with the case. It is a way of injecting some tension perhaps – but a pretty unrealistic one.
People get sick of jobs, give them up and do them badly but they take them when they’re offered. This is especially true of hard-up artists, like young Mr Hartright, a key player in THE WOMAN IN WHITE (Sunday, BBC1) who in reality would not have trudged with a heavy heart to a massive mansion in Cumbria to look after a rich bloke’s paintings and teach his nieces to draw.
As it happens, though, in this adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ classic chiller the reluctant artist is the least unbelievable element. Before leaving London for his new workplace, Walter Hartright (Ben Hardy) had a disturbing encounter with a white-clad young woman – apparently escaped from the asylum – who knew the Cumbrian village he was heading to.
On arrival at the household of the feeble yet cantankerous Frederick Fairlie (Charles Dance), Walter discovered that one of the man’s nieces bore a striking resemblance to the woman he had seen. Apart from that not-especially stunning coincidence, not a lot happened for much of the ensuing hour.
Walter lost his heart somewhat to Laura (Olivia Vinall), the woman-in-white doppelganger and the younger of Fairlie’s two nieces. This was a bad move, because she turned out to be betrothed to local toff Sir Percival Glyde (Dougray Scott). Walter was reminded his asylum-escaping friend had mentioned a “man of rank” and, mysteriously enough, the said woman in white then popped up, flitting through the grounds of the house and the local graveyard making dire pronouncements.
She said Glyde had locked her away and if Laura married him she would suffer. Yet you did not really need a ghostly woman in white to tell you that: a glance at the brutish Sir Percy would have done it.
Perhaps sensing that none of this mid-Victorian melodrama was likely to get 21st-century hearts racing, the adaptor spliced in lots of “after” scenes, with people wondering what had happened to Walter and referring to a terrible something without giving away what the something was. In terms of ramping up the tension, this device is on a par with the cop who does not want the case but does it anyway. Yawn.
Another weapon in the dramatist’s arsenal is claustrophobia, as in shutting all the characters in a room. In keeping with the Greek origins of the word and just as fittingly, THE DURRELLS (Sunday, ITV) took it to Corfu. A plague of wasps surrounded the madcap family’s house, meaning young Gerry’s 13th birthday party was a locked-in affair, with the buzzing tensions outside affecting the mood within.
What with adolescent Gerry (Milo Parker) in a grump because the goings-on were too babyish for him and Spiro (Alexis Georgoulis) sick with passion for Louisa (Keeley Hawes), it was at times on the edge of fine drama. As ever, though, this Greek play does not seem to know whether it is tragedy or comedy, so in the midst of the solid human stories we had Lugaretzia (Anna Savva) bothering the doctor about her intimate rash, a monk on a zip wire and other distractions.
I sometimes wish writer Simon Nye would do two versions of each episode or half an hour of gags before the grown-up stuff.