The weekend on television This blend of comedy and thrills proved irresistible
The bodies continued to fall like puncturewounded ninepins in the second electrifying instalment of Phoebe Waller-bridge’s Killing (BBC One, Saturday). Glamour-puss international assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) kicked off the episode chasing a Bulgarian businessman around an office – she could have just shot him but it was so much more fun prolonging the agony – and finished it accidentally liquidating her new boyfriend by leaving him alone with the deadly perfume she’d concocted for a hit job.
Waller-bridge’s misanthropic quirkiness is identifiable at a thousand paces – the signature was established with her hit non-rom-com Fleabag
– and Killing Eve’s swerve between workplace satire and violent espionage won’t be to all tastes.
The spectre, moreover, of a smirking Russian hired killer bumping people off with poisoned toxins has taken on a different resonance since the series’ initial airing on BBC America in April.
But for those willing to submit, Killing Eve’s blend of comedy and high-octane thrills once again proved irresistible. In the case of luckless paramour Sebastian (Charlie Hamblett) and the poisonous parfum, the humour was to be seen dancing in the eyes of Villanelle, a wry flicker waiting to catch fire. She’d absent-mindedly left him alone with the lethal concoction while she received a dressing down from her patron Konstantin (Kim Bodnia). Having been hauled over hot coals by her boss and then seen her boyfriend drop dead, Villanelle should have ended up crying uncontrollably.
Only Villanelle doesn’t do crying. She is a superhuman psychopath, blankly incurious about her targets. One person who has caught her attention, though, is Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) – a disorganised pencilpusher within the British intelligence services but the only one to intuit that a sequence of apparently unconnected killings across Europe might be the handiwork of the same killbot.
Eve doesn’t yet have a name for her adversary. Yet she was beginning to sense what she was up against as, with the covert backing of MI6 Russian section leader Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw), she settled into her job at the head of a black-ops unit tasked with tracking the killer.
Killing Eve is terribly arch, yet it has an addictive quality which manifested itself in this episode as the game of cat and mouse began to unfold. Who is hunting whom is the question to be answered.
Hofesh Shechter is the renowned Israeli-born, London-based choreographer who in recent years has yanked contemporary dance in all sorts of thrilling new directions. Created in 2016, for Nederlands Dans Theater, Clowns is by no means his best-known work (that accolade would go to his intergalactic odyssey Political Mother). And yet, its concision compared to that earlier work makes it a canny choice for BBC Two to have pounced on for Saturday night’s edition of its Performance Live series.
It was billed here as “a macabre comedy of murder and desire, asking how far will we go in the name of entertainment”. Shod only in socks that allow a slithery connection with the floor, 10 terrific performers chugged their way through his muscular, round-shouldered steps. As the choreographer’s own score (efficient, though not his best) built in volume and momentum, they also acted out an increasingly violent array of micro-vignettes, with multiple shootings leading to multiple throatslittings and even what amounts to a bluffer’s guide to execution.
As for how all this worked on TV, one of Shechter’s calling-cards has long been his fondness for deploying clever lighting to give the impression of lightning-speed cinematic “jump cutting” from one part of the stage to another. On the telly, this sort of live fun can’t possibly register, for the obvious reason that on telly you can – in terms of editing – do whatever you want at the push of a button.
That said, Shechter dived into his new medium with relish. As his camera prowled around the dancers, he also chucked in plenty of slow-mos, artful focus-blurring and (yes) sharp cuts to keep things interesting. The result was what must have been a fascinating introduction for newcomers to Shechter’s work and a taster for the greater creations in his canon, right up to the piece’s dark, witty, immaculately timed climax. Killing Eve ★★★★ Performance Live: Hofesh Shechter’s Clowns ★★★★