Murder Is Easy, review: mediocre Agatha Christie story is only made worse by unnecessary rewrites
Can we have a New Year’s Resolution to stop messing with old works of literature? Just agree that, if you’re going to adapt old books, those adaptations should be faithful to the original?
The odd tweak is fine. Few among us objected to Colin Firth’s wet shirt scene in Pride and Prejudice. The latest adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy (BBC One), though, plays on themes of colonialism and race, just as Steven Knight’s Great Expectations added guns and opium addiction.
Leaving aside the opening scene of the protagonist running through the woods – if I had five pounds for every drama that begins with someone running through the woods, I’d be spending Christmas in Gstaad – it begins with Christie’s plot intact. An elderly lady named Lavinia Pinkerton (Penelope Wilton) tells a fellow passenger that she is on her way to report a series of murders in her home village of Wychwood. More deaths are to come, she warns. But she dies before she can reach the police station.
The passenger is Luke Fitzwilliam (David Jonsson), who resolves to visit Wychwood and investigate. In Christie’s telling, Fitzwilliam was a retired British policeman returning from a posting in the Far East. Screenwriter Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre has turned this on its head: Fitzwilliam is now a Nigerian former attaché in the Colonial Office, on his way to a new job in Whitehall. His first stop in London is the West African Education Centre, where a female friend berates him as “self-colonised, collaborating with his oppressors”. Later, one of the suspects enthuses about a book named Race Hygiene: A Campaign to Create a Master Race.
If any of this enhanced Christie’s story, or teased out themes which were lurking just beneath the surface, it would be justified. But Ejiwunmi-Le Berre has said that the newly-drawn character is a homage to her Nigerian father and grandfather, and she has “commandeered” it “as a window to my forefathers’ experience”. Look, I’d be perfectly willing to watch a drama about their experience. Just not in the middle of a Christmas Agatha Christie.
Jonsson does his best despite the direction, which mostly consists of him being told to stare enigmatically at people or the middle distance. It’s not his fault that the character is a mess. The supporting cast has some decent names (Douglas Henshall, Mark Bonnar and Tamzin Outhwaite among them).
But the mundane truth is that this isn’t one of Christie’s top-tier works – her plotting is smart but there is no Marple or Poirot to pep it up. Rather than attempt to add interest by making changes, the BBC should have left this one on the shelf.
