Copyright newstatesman
How’s this for an explosive conversation? Art conservationist Sarah is seemingly being punished for some unknown sin by her banker husband, Mark, by way of hosting a dinner party for his uber-rich client Gerard and Gerard’s beautiful but bland wife, Paula. Sarah (Ruth Wilson) – the sort of relatable woman who burns her ear on her straighteners and passes off a shop-bought lasagne as home-made – has invited her big-vegan-energy friends, Rufus and… Wigwam. Gerard is boarish, performatively macho, with a slappable face and an approach to conversation perhaps most accurately described as “cruising for a bruising”. Wigwam, meanwhile, shows off her and Rufus’s matching tattoos (a scribble), “designed” by her son Ziggy, and announces their arrival thus: “Sorry we’re late – Rufus just had to rush out and buy some vegan lube!” You get the sense Sarah is trolling Mark with this mismatch (it took me a while to realise, because I was distracted by what a twat Gerard is, that Mark is a bit of a twat too). Gerard is doubling down on his view that “social justice warriors” have destroyed the adoption system, to Sarah’s growing fury, when he lights a cigar and, kaboom, the windows blow out. It’s a brilliant opening: sardonic, keenly observed, immaculate comic timing – wholly characteristic, it turns out, of Down Cemetery Road. Apple has already had great success with its adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slough House series Slow Horses, and has deployed one of its writers, Morwenna Banks, to work on this, the dramatisation of his Zoë Boehm novels. There’s much Slow Horses fans will recognise: dark comedy, unlikely heroes, plenty of pen-pushing, lashings of espionage. The explosion is not really anything to do with the cigar (though, really, indoors?!), but an apparent gas explosion at a nearby house, in which a John Doe and a woman are killed; her young daughter, Dinah, survives and is taken to hospital. But when Sarah attempts to deliver a card, drawn by one of Wigwam’s ruffians, to the ward, she is stonewalled by the nurses. At the police station, she meets similar resistance: the case file has been restricted. She also notices that a photograph used in news reports has been doctored to erase the little girl from a firefighter’s arms. Where is Dinah, and why would anyone try to erase or hide away the five-year-old victim of a gas explosion? Despite having no actual relationship with Dinah, Sarah is unable to let the whole thing go and employs the services of husband-wife private-investigator duo Joe and Zoë, played with her usual aplomb by Emma Thompson. I say “duo”, but Zoë is quite clear that the pair do not work as a team: she does the “same job as him, but better”. Joe is earnest and bumbling, fond of a cardie, and fancies himself a literary detective: he compares himself to Christopher Marlowe and does the Sherlock bit, deducing from her hands when they shake that Sarah paints. Zoë, by contrast, is solitary, brusque, a bit of a scamp. She wears her silver hair short and spiky, and a long leather coat, collar cocked, with a red lining, like a big Louboutin stiletto. It soon becomes clear that Zoë, Joe and Sarah have embroiled themselves in something bigger and more treacherous than they might have imagined. Sarah (white, middle class) is being followed by a man she, not wanting to say that he’s black, vaguely describes to Zoë as: “Well, he’s got a ponytail and a beard, drives a grey van…” We deduce, via meetings between hapless handler Hamza and his ball-crushing Ministry of Defence boss, known only as “C”, that the whole thing is some sort of secret services scheme gone awry. C gets all the best one-liners. “You couldn’t protect him if he used you as a condom,” he derides Hamza. When Hamza says that Dinah is “not quite ready to come out” of hospital, C spits back: “What is she, a cake?” The whole thing is hugely enjoyable, a delectable blend of intrigue and jokes, often at the expense of identity politics. Wilson deftly draws out Sarah’s shades of grey: one minute she is a singularly brave warrior in search of truth and justice, the next a delusional woman who’s listened to one too many a true crime podcast. Thompson, by contrast, is in technicolour, too famous to ever really disappear into a role. But when it’s this much fun, who cares?
