Cumberbatch struggles through the pain with class
BBC TWO 9.00PM
Ian Mcewan, who writes so forensically about isolation, presents a high bar for screen adaptation. His stories need actors who are good at playing thinkers. Thanks to that clever detective of his, no one around has done quite so much thinking as Benedict Cumberbatch.
In The Child in Time (BBC One, Sunday), about a couple who grapple with the disappearance of their daughter, all the action took place at the dread beginning and the redemptive end. Between these bookends Cumberbatch, as grieving author Stephen Lewis, kept a lid on trauma. His performance was all about English understatement, about struggling through the pain. Even when little Kate vanished it was all the more agonising that he couldn’t bring himself to scream his lungs to shreds. Kelly Macdonald, as his wife Julie, did all the explosive gurning before retreating into a shell on the beach.
Stephen Butchard’s careful script vouchsafed Cumberbatch a couple of breakout moments and he fell on them, eyes alight with disinterred feeling: a feverish delusion when he thought he’d found Kate in a school; a speech loaded with passion about a child’s joy at discovering the alphabet.
The other half of the story, in which publishing guru Charles Darke (Stephen Campbell Moore) rebelled against a nannyish government plan to issue child-rearing directives, felt a little arch away from the page. Campbell Moore was very affecting as he descended into madness in muddy shorts, but on screen Mcewan’s argument about man’s tragic expulsion from boyhood slightly smacked of oblique literary contrivance.
Julian Farino (who directed the touching drama Marvellous) patiently uncovered the story’s substrata, while the soundtrack by Adrian Johnston underscored the slow progress from dark to light – noodling mood piano joined, eventually, by urgent strings. Even the costume department was in on the story: Stephen’s perennial blue threads suggested a man stuck in a single place.
The novel was published 20 years before the disappearance of Madeleine Mccann (since when it’s become a lot harder to break into schools and delivery suites than Stephen found). Perhaps Mcewan would tell a different story now, but this updated blast from his past was a rewarding story of private pain.
It’s not necessarily the job of science fiction to foretell the future, but posterity will always pat it on the back for having got it spot on. Electric
Dreams (Channel 4, Sunday) the anthology of Philip K Dick’s short stories, is on a more complicated journey.
Dick’s imagination was operative when the technology we now take for granted looked like wizardry with nobs on. The writers of the drama series’ 10 episodes were given carte blanche to invent as they pleased. So unless you read the source material first, you’re never quite sure if you’re watching Dick’s retro-predictions, or something else entirely.
The second instalment in the series was written (and directed) by David Farr, whose adaptation of The Night Manager boldly rejigged Le Carre’s original. It felt like a snapshot of the way we now commercialise unreality. Its setting – a virtual theme-park offering tours through space – was not dissimilar to the synthetic universes summoned up by contemporary video games or CGI cinema in 3D.
A client arrived to test the limits of the demoralised staff ’s loyalty to the status quo. Irma (Geraldine Mcewan), claiming to be 340, requested a trip to Planet Earth, specifically a sparkling ancestral memory of a waterfall in Carolina. Although they knew Earth to be long since extinct, they accepted her careful of cash anyway and set off on a trek through the galaxies, destination solar system S483B65. “We’re con artists,” worried Brian (Jack Reynor). “What other type is there?” retorted his colleague Ed (Benedict Wong) before humming a line or two of Fagin’s theme tune “You’ve got to pick a pocket or two”.
The story, about the longings that precede death, played out as a remedial journey into the perilous unknown. It felt somehow right that the denouement never quite laid all its cards on the deck; sci-fi which over-explains itself leaves no room to ponder its provocative visions. Reynor nobly grappled with his conscience, while Chaplin, that now lined face of hers bearing the ghostly imprint of her father, was affecting as a woman on the brink of the inevitable. And her robot servant was believable too, which is always a good sign.
The Child in Time ★★★★★ Electric Dreams ★★★