A tantalising start to this latest le Carré adaptation
Even by the standards of the BBC’S exceptionally strong drama slate this autumn. expectations for its new John le Carré adaptation were high. And The Little Drummer Girl (BBC One) didn’t disappoint. But as the curtain closed on last night’s opening episode, one couldn’t help feeling that some fans of the BBC’S previous le Carré mega-hit, The Night Manager, would have been left feeling a mite short-changed. Or at the very least confused.
It was hailed as being “by the team behind The Night Manager”. But not in terms of such vital components as director, scriptwriter and production design. Nowhere in evidence was the dizzying high gloss and dazzling contemporary pulchritude that drew millions to The Night Manager’s morally ambiguous story of highrolling international intrigue.
Instead what we got was an anxious, often deeply claustrophobic tale of an Israeli secret service team’s hunt for an elusive Palestinian terrorist cell in early-eighties Europe – led by grizzled philosopher-hunter Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon), a character straight out of le Carré’s cerebral Cold War-era playbook.
It wasn’t entirely without glamour, but it was restrained. Much of last night’s opener was set in Greece. Rising star Florence Pugh impressed as Charlie, a young British actress whose accidentally-on-purpose holiday encounter on Naxos with an Israeli intelligence officer (Alexander Skarsgard) turned out to be a bizarre audition for a more sinister role dreamt up for her by Kurtz.
A particular high point was Pugh and Skarsgard’s gloriously shot night-time visit to the Acropolis. Much-vaunted Korean director Park Chan-wook certainly brought his painterly cinematic eye to that moment but kept it on the leash elsewhere. Most evidently in the flat concrete greys, browns and oranges of his achingly (and slightly anachronistic) Seventies colour palette. Even the normally shimmering blues of sea and sky in Greece were dialled right down to fit the aesthetic.
What The Little Drummer Girl did exceptionally well was atmosphere – the stresses and tensions of surveillance and conspiracy. No one who knows the book could fail to admire the economy with which adapter Michael Lesslie filleted down le Carré’s lengthy and largely internalised set-up into an hour of disorientating, tantalising drama.
That’s what it remains for now: a tease. A conundrum. Whether it will actually deliver on its promise is as mystifying as where it is heading. But the signs are good.
The final part of Tony Marchant’s thoughtful drama Butterfly (ITV) couldn’t have been more different. It was an appeal to the head that came straight from the heart. Thus far, we have watched parents Vicky (Anna Friel) and Stephen (Emmett J Scanlan) bickering, battling and tearing each other to pieces over the fate of their beloved 11-year-old Maxine (Callum Booth-ford), a girl born in a boy’s body. But events had taken a darker turn in the wake of Maxine’s self-harming after being refused puberty blockers by her transgender clinic.
So we opened with the family waking up to the shocking news that Vicky had taken Maxine across the Atlantic for private treatment in Boston. Once again, the chief virtue of Marchant’s drama was its lack of worthiness and capacity for capturing the feelings of everyone involved. Stephen’s spitefulness in reporting Vicky to the police, and having her arrested on her return to the UK, wasn’t so much the act of an evil monster as that of an ordinary man struggling to cope with feelings and circumstances that were overwhelming him. Vicky’s behaviour, however extreme, suggested a mother desperately seeking to both protect and do what’s right by her child.
Even the court-appointed social worker, rarely an appealing character in a drama such as this, got a reasonable portrayal. And if the resolution – a coming together once more for the parents and a change of heart by the clinic – felt a mite too easily achieved given the anguish that had gone before, it was still dramatically satisfying.
All this was, undoubtedly, down to the excellence of Marchant’s script; once again bolstering his reputation for getting to the heart of topical subjects accessibly and sensitively. But more than anything it was the palpable passion in the acting that drove this drama. Ultimately, this was a remarkably well-balanced treatment of one of the hottest hot-button issues of our time.
The Little Drummer Girl ★★★★ Butterfly ★★★★