THE NIGHT MANAGE RESS!

After the hugely popular Night Manager, the BBC has another twisting John le Carré tale – this time following a woman caught up in a bombing plot

Espionage, exotic locations, an outsider who becomes a spy and a fiendishly complicated plot – it could only be one of John le Carré’s brilliantly twisting tales. The Little Drummer Girl follows the huge success of another adaptation of a le Carré masterpiece, 2016’s The Night Manager.

Once again, the series on BBC1 has been produced by John’s sons, Simon and Stephen Cornwell, but whereas The Night Manager was a modern-day tale focusing on the illegal arms trade, The Little Drummer Girl is set in the 70s amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

‘The Little Drummer Girl is one of le Carré’s greatest books; it is also huge, bold and complicated,’ says Simon. ‘After The Night Manager we wanted something that shared its ambition, scale and scope that was also radically different from it in terms of tone and approach, story-telling and context.’

Stephen adds, ‘They are both infiltrator stories, about someone operationally entering an alien environment and they come with personal points of view. You travel through the story with them. Great thrillers are often great love stories. In Little Drummer Girl you have a love story interweaving with an imaginary love story and it leads to a unique thriller.’

The main character is Charlie, an English actress who likes to think she’s leftwing and radical but hasn’t thought through many of her ideas. She becomes the subject of a plot to catch a family of Palestinian bombers hatched by Martin Kurtz, a boss in the Israeli secret service ( Mossad). While on a trip to Greece, Charlie meets and falls for Becker, one of Kurtz’s team that also includes his deputy Litvak and the beautiful Rachel.

At the time the six-part series is set, Palestinians were using attractive Western women to help them bomb Israelis and Jews. In the drama, bomb-maker Khalil is the leader of a terrorist campaign against such targets in Europe. Charlie has been encouraged by Kurtz’s team to pretend she’s had a romance with one of Khalil’s brothers, Michel, to fool the rest of the cell that she’s on their side.

To further complicate matters, Mossad agents follow Charlie on her return to England, riling UK spy boss Commander Picton, who doesn’t like the Israelis being on his patch. And also on the scene is Khalil’s German associate Helga, who aims to take Charlie under her wing.

As a talented but struggling actress, Charlie’s excited about taking part in what is a starring role: saving lives, centre-stage in the ‘theatre of the real’. But as she becomes further embroiled and hears about both sides of the conflict, she’s con-

fused about how she feels. ‘Charlie’s good at lying, good at making people believe her,’ says Florence Pugh, the star of 2016 film Lady Macbeth who plays her. ‘But then she gets into something way beyond her realm.’

The backdrop of the Israel-Palestine conflict could be controversial but the producers say they’ve tried to be even-handed. ‘I hope what you see are rounded human beings, drawn through the story by their passions and their emotion,’ says Simon. ‘It’s a complicated landscape. We just focused on telling the story through the people, hoping to achieve a level of balance, and really opening the tale up for viewers to think about it and draw their own conclusions.’