Rape or consent? TV drama tackling the most pungent issue of our age
AT FIRST they seem like a dream couple, perhaps even made for each other. Teacher Laura has broken up with her childhood sweetheart and seems happy at the prospect of a new life without him.
Surgeon Andrew is a widower, a wearer of scrubs, a dutiful single dad. In their small town on the Kentish coast, she teaches his son at school, he works with her sister at the hospital.
There has always been a tremor of mutual attraction between them, for each is very far from being filed under undateable or dismissed as a loser.
She is blonde, pretty and intelligent, dedicated to her job. He is tall, dark and handsome, equally devoted to his job. So dinner sometime? Why not? Just another couple of alphas taking a bet on each other.
Soon there is red wine, romance and a walk home from the restaurant in the crisp night air. Yet back at her place afterwards, something terrible happens, something that will change their lives and those of their families forever – an accusation of date rape. Andrew says they had consensual sex, Laura says he raped her – but who is telling the truth?
The answer to that question will be reeled out over the next six weeks in Liar, ITV’s new drama series about gender politics and the aftershocks that blight the modern sexual landscape. Starring Joanne Froggatt as Laura Newell and Ioan Gruffudd as Andrew Earlham, each one-hour episode of Liar attempts to peel back the smears and deceit in an emotional exploration of consent, sexual violence and rape accusers.
Last night’s first episode left viewers unsure of whom to believe, as both versions of events seem equally plausible. Laura can’t quite remember what happened but she does not waver in her belief that it did happen. She tells the police: ‘I wasn’t drunk. I remember coming into the bedroom, I remember him pushing me down and I remember as clear as anything I told him to stop.’
Andrew is equally vehement that he behaved like a gentleman throughout. Did he force himself upon her? ‘God no! If I thought for one second that she didn’t want to sleep with me...’ he says, shaking his head in disbelief.
Liar is created by Harry and Jack Williams, the producer and screenwriter brothers who also made the hugely popular television series, The Missing. They have been extremely clever to set their new drama in a middle class milieu, where both protagonists are attractive and desirable professionals apparently in control of their ordered, crime-free lives.
The series is shot in Deal, where Laura and Andrew live in equally ravishing properties decorated in fetching oceanic shades. He roars around in a sports car, she relaxes by skimming through the waterways in a kayak. They are known to each other, they have friends in common, their lives are already enmeshed. It might seem an unlikely scenario for a drama about sexual violence, but statistics show that women are far more likely to be attacked by someone they know, than a stranger hiding in a dark alley.
OF course, Joanne Froggatt is best known for playing lady’s maid Anna Bates in Downton Abbey, a character who was raped by a valet in one dramatic storyline. Justice was dispensed back then when Anna – or was it her husband? – took the law into their own hands. In Liar there are no easy solutions. Laura initially seeks revenge by posting details of her perception of the rape on Andrew’s social media pages. This impulsive act exposes him to online ridicule and abuse – but also herself. ‘Laura doesn’t always make the right decisions, she is flawed,’ said Froggatt in a recent interview.
Rape and consent are some of the most pungent issues of our Tinder-dating age, subjects that always create huge interest and explosive headlines. Look at Julian Assange, who still chooses to hide in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, rather than face charges of sexual assault in Sweden. Elsewhere it took two trials to find footballer Ched Evans not guilty of raping a 19- year- old woman in a hotel room in Wales, a girl who was initially deemed too drunk to consent.
And in the popular soap Emmerdale, a recent storyline had one character jailed for the rape of his ex-wife – although crime research suggests that most wife rapes go unreported. Even if they do go to court, guilty verdicts are rare. As Laura gets angrier and angrier in Liar, she quotes a statistic used by the Rape Crisis charity which states that of 85,000 rapes of women in England and Wales every year, only 5.7 per cent result in a conviction. (Partly because only 15 per cent of women, claim the charity, will report rape to the police in the first place.)
Last year, Crown Prosecution Service statistics reported a rise in rape referrals from the police of 11.3 per cent (6,855 referrals), a rise in prosecutions (4,643) and also in convictions (2,689). These conviction rates, claims DPP Alison Saunders, are the highest ever.
There has been progress, but clearly there is still room for improvement when it comes to extracting justice for victims. Yet as Laura’s case begins to unfold and Andrew’s dark past unfurls, the messiness of life begins to intrude on any clarity of this situation. ‘It all happened in a blur,’ says Laura, who then gets furious when the police ask her how much she had to drink. There also are hints of mental health problems in her past.
‘They will look at my medical history and call me a hysterical madwoman telling lies about their hero surgeon,’ she fumes – and it is hard to argue with her thesis. Meanwhile ambiguous Andrew shimmers around town with a frown on his giant brow, his gaze a pool of horror, his scalpel hand beginning to shake.
THANKFULLY in this instance the truth will come out, but surely the private nature of rape or a rape accusation is part of the problem in real life? There are rarely any witnesses, in circumstances that are open to interpretation by judge and jury.
For most cases of sexual assault, it all boils down to one person’s word against another in open court. Who is to be believed? And who is to be believed here?
Liar depicts the complications and feints quite brilliantly. Laura has no bruising and no drugs in her system (she claims Andrew put something in her wine). He has no scratches on his face or body and no reason to attack her in the first place.
Throughout last night’s drama, Laura became easy to dislike and was made to look as unattractive as possible. She oscillates with rage, she shouts at the police, she scrapes her hair back, revealing a little tortoise face set hard against the storm.
However, it is hard to believe that any contemporary drama about rape will not depict the woman accuser as the victim rather than the fantasist. Or that any television company would broadcast anything to discourage women from reporting an attack. But Liar is layered and already surprising. Perhaps the truth is that the truth can be interpreted in different ways and that there really are two sides to every story.