BOOKS & ARTS
Television
Her dark materials
James Walton
The Little Drummer Girl (BBC1, Sunday) is
the new John le Carré adaptation from the
production company that brought us The
Night Manager. It’s also directed by Park
Chan-wook from South Korea, a man gen-
erally referred to by film buffs as an ‘auteur’.
All of which may be just as well, because
with a less distinguished pedigree, the first
episode might possibly have seemed a bit
corny. The opening section, for example, fea-
tured the impeccably complicated delivery
of a Palestinian bomb to the Bonn residence
of a Jewish attaché in 1979, and would, I’m
fairly sure, have proved exciting enough
without being cunningly overlaid by a series
of loudly ticking clocks.
I’d also suggest that the terrorists — for
Cinema
Men behaving badly
Deborah Ross
Peterloo
12A, NationwideMike Leigh’s Peterloo is one of those films
where you keep waiting for it to get good,
and waiting and waiting. It’s Mike Leigh; it’s
bound to get good soon. But it never does.
It’s essentially two hours of men shouting at
each other, followed by a burst of violence.
I sincerely wish it were otherwise, but there
you are.
This is the story of the Peterloo Massa-
cre (16 August 1819), when government-
backed cavalry charged a peaceable crowd
of around 60,000 who had gathered in St
Peter’s Field, Manchester, to demand uni-
versal suffrage. Fifteen were killed and hun-
dreds more injured, including women and
children. The film has been getting it in the
neck from some quarters ever since the pro-
ject was announced. It’s just a lefty plot to
show the ruling classes in a bad light, the
right have said. We’re not bad people! TheSome ensemble smudges aside, Stuart Strat-
ford holds the whole together in careful,
muted balance, his Halloween horror story
written in sinister sepia rather than blood.
From muted understatement to baroque
excess at the Barbican. There’s a reason eve-
ryone from Joyce DiDonato onwards wants
to work with period ensemble Il Pomo
d’Oro. Under its precocious chief conductor,
Maxim Emelyanychev, the group’s signature
style — swift speeds, crunchy textures and
explosive articulation — has only become
more so. It’s an approach alive to drama and
rhetoric, well suited to the quick-fire tragi-
comedy of Handel’s Serse.
The opera’s tonal ambiguities may not
have suited an 18th-century audience, but
its opera seria send-up plays well today,
especially with so skilled a cast of special-
ists and Emelyanychev himself, smuggling
humour into his continuo playing like a
schoolboy with a catapult in his pocket. A
concert framework barely dulled the drama,
which is really all in the music anyway —
Francesca Aspromonte’s flighty coloratura
and pouting trills, Inga Kalna’s silken lega-
to and sober delivery painting a vivid pic-
ture of Handel’s two rival sisters, with Vivica
Genaux irresistible as the object of both
their affections.
But Serse is all about its self-dramatis-
ing man-child of a king — who, incidentally,
isn’t really asking us to admire the beauty
of a plane tree in his famous opening aria,
so much as the beauty of himself admir-
ing it — and countertenor Franco Fagioli
never once let us forget that. Bedecking
and bedizening his arias with more orna-
ments than a royal mistress, leaping over
octaves with insouciant ease and generally
running amok, he gave us glorious vulgarity
and the audience loved it. Bring on Agrip-
pina next May.
all their bombing ingenuity — might want
to rethink their safe-house policy: maybe to
the point of not leaving their windows wide
open so they could be spied on and photo-
graphed at will by the Israeli secret services.
(Or, failing that, they might keep an eye out
for blokes with binoculars and cameras in
the equally open window over the road.)
The Israeli team is led by Martin Kurtz
(Michael Shannon), whose handy way
with an aphorism doesn’t do much to ban-
ish the prevailing staginess. Before long,
he’d decided that, rather than simply tak-
ing out the baddies, he’ll infiltrate their cell
with a westerner — on the unimpeachable
grounds that ‘To catch a lion, a toy goat
won’t work’.
So how would he recruit his new spy?
A discreet invitation to an unmarked build-
ing somewhere? An ‘accidental’ meeting in
a park? Well, no. Instead, he opted to find
a left-wing London theatre group, identify
a young actress called Charlie (Florence
Pugh) as the desired agent, anonymously
fund a trip to Naxos for the entire troupe
and send in a hunky mystery man (Alexan-der Skarsgard) to invite her to Athens. All
that remained then was to hire the Acrop-
olis for a night so that the mystery man
could romance her properly, before driv-
ing her at terrifyingly high speed (for some
reason) to a house where he himself was
waiting with the line: ‘Welcome, Charlie. I
am the producer, writer and director of our
little show. And I would like to talk to you
about your part.’
I can’t deny that I quite enjoyed Sunday’s
episode. Park’s auteurism is evident in every
perfectly framed shot. The 1970s atmosphere
is nicely done, conjuring up an era that was
both a lot browner and lot less uptight than
our own. The plot is pretty intriguing too,
especially the question of what it is about
Charlie — a pleasant but so far unremarka-
ble woman — that makes her worthy of such
a baroque recruitment process. Nonetheless,
after the programme ended, there was still a
feeling that perhaps she wasn’t the only one
who’d just been taken for an elaborate ride.
In a recent interview, Julia Davis won-
dered whether people would keep asking
her why her comedy is so dark if she were
a man. The answer is, of course, ‘yes’ —
because the genuinely horrible has been the
unignorable hallmark of her work ever since
2004’s Nighty Night, in which she played a
seductive sociopath of the kind that Killing
Eve’s Villanelle might have considered a lit-
tle heartless.
In Sally4Ever (Sky Atlantic, Thursday)
she does it again, only this time the socio-
path is a lesbian, and the result impressively
manages to be her darkest show yet, as if sheWhile she was able to turn down his
offer to watch him masturbate,
we weren’t so luckyand her audience are locked together in an
often alarming game of How Far Can You
Go?
Last week’s opening episode began with
Sally (Catherine Shepherd) reluctantly
accepting a tearful marriage proposal from
her middle-aged boyfriend David. (Male
neediness is another longstanding Davis
theme.) He then got sexually excited at
the thought of her in his mother’s old wed-
ding dress — and, while she was able to turn
down his offer to watch him masturbate, we
weren’t so lucky.
But that was before Davis’s Emma came
along in full amoral seductress mode, culmi-
nating in a memorable sex scene (however
much you might have wanted to forget it)
which, among other things, saw her orally
removing Sally’s blood-stained tampon.
Now Emma has moved into Sally’s house
— actually David’s, but he’s been kicked out
— and decorated the front room with a naked
picture of herself. In her quest for more lives
to casually destroy, she’s also turned to Sally
and David’s respective parents.
In theory, Davis’s utter fearlessness is to
be applauded. In practice, it still is — par-
ticularly as the brilliantly repellent action
is accompanied by brilliantly repellent
one-liners. (‘Having the colostomy was
the best thing I ever did,’ remarked Sally’s
wheelchair-bound colleague on Thursday.
‘I never liked going to the toilet.’) Even
so, after 30 minutes of this stuff, you might
find yourself experiencing a strange urge to
watch something like, say, Last of the Sum-
mer Wine.