Clear your Sunday evenings for The Night Manager
When a novel by John le Carré makes its way onto the small screen, expectation reaches for the sky.
Tinker Tailor
Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, adapted by the author himself and starring the great Alec Guinness as the all-English sphinx George Smiley, are still the espionage dramas against which all contenders must be measured.
No wonder The Night Manager (BBC One, Sunday), the first novel le Carré wrote after the collapse of the Soviet Union, loitered in an out-tray for more than two decades. Such a long wait would normally turn a book into a historical curio, but not here. The first episode of the BBC’s new adaptation was event drama of not only the highest calibre but also the most pressing necessity.
Scriptwriter David Farr has made the bold but logical move to update le Carré’s angry plot about the illegal arms trade to the hyper-weaponised, super-volatile here and now. Where once Smiley played cat and mouse in the Cold War, here we are hurtled into the sizzling uproar of the Arab Spring.
So it was on the streets of Cairo in 2011 that we first encountered Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), Iraq veteran turned hotel night manager, striding serenely through a blizzard of tear gas grenades and semi-automatic gunfire as Egyptians demanded the overthrow of Mubarak. Togged up in pastel linens, here was the kind of dauntless English hero that they don’t make the way they used to.
Equally old-school was the glorious, implacable British businessman Richard Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie) whom Pine, by the end of the episode, had volunteered to hunt down and destroy. A short promo saw Roper vaunt his credentials as a great humanitarian, offering safe havens to the displaced. But then the name of his company soon appeared on a shopping list of guns, bombs and rockets destined for the Middle East.
Already both performances have a gold-standard feel to them, in that you can’t imagine anyone else as either character. Hiddleston’s ramrod spine and blue-eyed civility seemed custommade for the role of a contemporary Sir Galahad come to rescue a weary world. Meanwhile Laurie, all slippery vowels, looked likely to prove every bit as hypnotic as Andrew Scott’s Moriarty in Sherlock.
Leading a 24-carat cast of supporting players was Olivia Colman as Burr, the intelligence officer who by the end of the episode had recruited Pine as Roper’s nemesis. Viewers have long since accepted that Colman can do just about anything. Here, taking ownership of a character who is male in the novel, she compellingly seethed and snarled as a sarcastic protector of British decency in the face of shoulder-shrugging realpolitik.
She also offered a modernising corrective to le Carré’s somewhat binary take on femininity in decorous evidence elsewhere. In the flighty blonde corner was Jed, Roper’s longlegged trophy girlfriend (Elizabeth Debicki). In the sultry brunette corner was tempting, tragic damsel-in-distress Sophie (Aure Atika), murdered by her Egyptian boyfriend for leaking details of his gun-running.
Much the most important woman in the entire operation was the Oscarwinning Danish director Susanne Bier. Her gift for portraying the agonies of conscience and brute compromise meant that every scene crackled with engrossing tension.
Given a reported budget of £20million to work with on The Night
Manager, Bier also made sure the expenditure was gratifyingly visible. Epic locations included a Whitehall banqueting hall, a desert road in which tyres spat up a plume of dust, and the echoing silhouettes of a bristling Matterhorn and the eternal Pyramids. If there was a debt to another globetrotting British agent, it was deftly acknowledged in Burr’s phone number: +44 700 70 70 70, although this was a far more psychological inquisition than anything seen in Bond.
The only sadness of updating the action to the present day is that we have lost any belief that a clapped-out old Blighty, racked with self-disgust and awash with dirty foreign cash, can find any sort of redemption through the lone agency of a chivalrous man of action.
If Pine feels too good to be quite true, and Roper too bad, the real deal is embodied by Corky, the villain’s gofer who pulled rank with inferiors and genuflected before power. The ever-glorious Tom Hollander (soon to be seen in Julian Fellowes’s adaptation of Trollope’s Doctor Thorne) imbued him with effete menace. Clear your Sunday evenings for the next six weeks.
The Night Manager ★★★★★