Collateral is a gripping yarn in need of a tighter script
Last night, John Simm’s New Labour luvvie in Collateral, BBC Two’s four-part political thriller, was pitted against John Simm’s grieving class warrior in ITV’S psychodrama Trauma. In all honesty, though, the casting of Carey Mulligan, not as the usual sweet waif à la Suffragette, but a spiky detective in Collateral, was far more interesting. As DI Kip Glaspie, she defied expectations in the opening episode, bringing gravitas to a role she admitted in a recent interview she thought herself unsuitable for.
Written by David Hare – the award-winning auteur with whom Mulligan worked on a 2014 production of his play, Skylight – Collateral is an inherently exciting state-of-the-nation piece, a patchwork of meticulously researched storylines concerning gun violence and immigration, knitted together with terrific performances and noirish direction from SJ Clarkson (Jessica Jones, Life on Mars).
The plot – about the shooting of a Syrian pizza delivery man – moved fast, ricocheting from one story arc to the next. Blink and you’ll have fallen behind as viewers were introduced to several disparate characters, all connected, from gay female vicar Jane (Nicola Walker), to ketamine-addled young clubber Linh (Kae Alexander), to rebellious Labour MP David (Simm), to posh single mother Karen (Billie Piper), who lives in the mansion block where the murder took place.
Nuance wasn’t in the opener’s lexicon. Gripping though it was, it was also riddled with clunking exposition, some of which, frankly, tickled me. Take the scene in which David lay in bed with his new girlfriend Suki (Kim Medcalf). “We’ve got to sort this out,” she turned to him. “We can’t go on like this... We’ve been on three dates.” Later, she wrote him a letter with the kind of emotions you’d expect from 10 years of marriage, not a brief fling! If Hare was truly tapped into the zeitgeist, he’d know that the modern dating world is far more cutthroat than that. Worse still was how, in another scene, a forensic officer crowbarred in the mention of Glaspie’s unlikely backstory – she was a professional pole-vaulter – with all the subtlety of an automatic weapon.
Hare does have form for this, though. Yes, he’s one of this country’s most venerable playwrights, but let’s not forget his last foray into television was hobbled by heavy-handed dialogue, too (Salting the Battlefield, which concluded his Worricker Trilogy in 2014). With a set-up this tantalising, what a shame it would be if Collateral’s script doesn’t settle down. Patrick Smith
Simm’s second outing of the evening was Trauma (ITV), another psychodrama from Doctor Foster creator Mike Bartlett, in which two characters are locked in personal conflict. It began with father-of-three Dan Bowker (Simm) and Adrian Lester’s trauma surgeon Jon Allerton sharing touching moments with their children: Allerton rock climbing with his teenage daughter; Bowker talking to his 15-year-old son Alex on the phone after school.
Before long, though, Bowker was bursting into the trauma unit where his son, who had been stabbed, was dying on the operating table as Allerton massaged his heart. It was a distressing scene, as the situation went from out of control to over. “Alex isn’t going to become anything,” said his desolate father at his funeral in a crushing eulogy that captured the end of all possible futures.
This was the sort of emotional realism that has forged a new era for playwrights on TV in recent years. Many viewers have never stopped lamenting the dying of the BBC’S Play for Today, which shuffled stage dramatists, such as Mike Leigh, into our living rooms. Yet, everywhere you look on TV these days, playwrights are taking up residence: Jez Butterworth with Sky Atlantic’s Britannia and David Hare with Collateral.
Trauma was pure theatre: it had long, confrontational, two-handed scenes between Simm and Lester, as Bowker tried to pressure the smooth Allerton into admitting he had made a fatal mistake. Simm’s intensity and Lester’s ability to portray confidence buckling into doubt deserved a “tour de force” recommendation. Yet television is a medium that loves realism, and Bartlett stuck solidly to it, concentrating on bringing his characters to life. At times they seemed almost too real, with Jade Anouka as Allerton’s daughter bringing some much-needed playfulness into the suffocating atmosphere of anguish.
At its heart, Trauma may be about a clash between haves and have-nots, between those who give the explanations and those who just have to accept them, but as human drama it has considerable force. Chris Harvey Collateral ★★★ Trauma ★★★★