A compelling story of a couple’s audacious deception
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe is a thrilling re-enactment of a true-crime story that catapulted a married couple into the global media spotlight.
Streaming on BritBox, the four-part limited-series will leave viewers in awe of the daring moves made by a wife and mother of two to safeguard her husband.
BAFTA award-wining actress, Monica Dolan is cast as Anne Darwin, the lead and narrator of the show which tells the compelling story of how she became complicit in her narcissistic husband John’s (Eddie Marsan) ploy to fake his death to claim life insurance and avoid bankruptcy.
“It really is a fascinating story. It’s an astonishingly interesting relationship between John and Anne. It’s also a series of events that is incredibly bizarre, and yet if you follow what they were trying to do, every individual event makes sense,” said Dolan.
The story written by British TV writer, actor, producer and musician Chris Lang follows the sequences of events leading up the couple being caught by police for the audacious deception.
The drama focuses on how Anne convinced the world, family and friends, the police and insurance companies, that John had gone missing in 2002 while canoeing off the coast of Seaton Carew in Cleveland, where the couple owned two large houses with panoramic views of the sea. Meanwhile, John secretively live just metres away from the family home.
“One of the things I found very, very clever is that Anne is narrating the story, so there’s this whole issue of her mendacity. How true will her narration be? How much of what she is saying is genuine? It’s always very interesting to play a character who is untruthful,” Dolan said.
She said she enjoyed playing a real person, “Imagination is the most important tool as an actor. That’s the fun zone. So playing someone real is quite a gift. You have so much information about them, and the audience ends up with the stories that are more interesting. Real people have so many contradictions.”
But the deception was to take its toll on Anne who lied to their sons, Mark and Anthony, for five years. Devastated by the loss of their father, neither son had an inkling their parents were capable of such betrayal.
The couple eventually decided to leave Seaton Carew and move to Panama City to start a new life together before their secret was exposed by the discovery of an infamous photo of them posing in a Panama real estate office in July 2006.
In reality, journalist David Leigh was the first to track down Anne as she was on the verge of setting up their new life in Panama, and The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe was inspired by his memoir.
Lang said before he took to writing the script, he had read close to 50 press stories, 1 000 pages of police interviews, 1 000 pages of court documents and an early manuscript of a book by Leigh. “Every time I turned a page of the research, there was another extraordinary revelation. I kept finding myself thinking, ‘I can’t believe they did that. And then that. And then that’. It was just a story that kept on giving and so saying ‘yes’ to it was a no-brainer,” shared Lang.
Speaking of what motivated him to make Anne the narrator, he said she’s more complex than John.
“In many ways, John Darwin is a relatively easy character to understand (his is the story of a narcissist) but Anne is much more complex, so to try to understand how a mother could have committed such a heinous crime, I decided to place her at the centre of the piece, and then create a device which allowed us to hear her inner monologue, her actual thought processes,” he said.
He claimed because the real Anne did not want to speak to him, there was some degree of imagination used for her character development.
“It was an ‘educated imagination’, because I was also drawing on a lot of research to help me understand her journey. We do not underplay the hideous things she did. We owed it to the sons, the real victims of John and Anne’s crimes, to be truthful.
“I can’t imagine a greater betrayal than a mum telling you your dad is dead when she knows he is actually still alive. Pretending to be grieving for five years, allowing them to grieve for five years – what would possess a mother to do that? It seems unthinkable to any parent,” Lang said.
He said he was delighted to work with both leads, Monica Dolan and Eddie Marsan, whom he admired for many years.
“I am beyond delighted to have worked with two of the finest actors of their generation. I have admired them both from afar for many years, not in a creepy way though.”