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Last night’s new Marple started out in the usual fashion - gothic church organs - and continued to ramble on in the true style of a country house mystery. A mad woman, a shifty doctor, a lurking butler, two creepy children, snakes, dashing young men, terribly nice young women, and another mad woman all combined with the secrets, the lies, the eastern mystery to make this yet another satisfying instalment in the Marple series. Sadly there were no vicars.
I must point out that the story that aired last night bears little resemblance to the book, aside from the broad plot. For one thing, Marple herself isn’t in the book, and it does seem like she has been shoehorned in. The excellent Julia MacKenzie performs well enough to make her mark though and makes this a Marple plot by the strength of her observing presence, leaving the theatricals to the young and the mad. Georgia Moffett’s performance for example was a little irritating; she really hammed up the pouting and the flouncing, but in the end she fitted in fine with the rest of the cast whose flung cutlery, mad wails and meaningful looks settled into the nicely camp, outrageously English world of Agatha Christie. My favourite line by far was Moffett’s enthusiastic “This is such a lark! Two dead bodies and we haven’t even got started yet!”
From start to finish, this was a confusing plot of mistaken identities, snake venom and the ever-present question of ‘what happened in China?’ Christie stories betray a deep mistrust of the orient as a place where morals go out of the window and where murder and deceit are commonplace, although it has to be said that it therefore shares many characteristics with the English country house. The house in question, Castle Savage, is a hotbed of repressed emotions, stifled passion and occasional escaping moments of insanity, with murky connections to the orient, making it a double whammy of naughty secrets.
Traditionalists will be upset, and I can see their point. By messing around with the plot, ITV made it messy, and it was not one to be revisited as a classic. Samantha Bond’s performance was disappointingly shrill, Freddie Fox was a little weak and Tom Briers didn’t have enough to do. However, I thought that despite its shortcomings, Marple delivered what audiences have come to expect from these adaptations, which is a nice way to spend an evening accompanied by some crumpets and a pot of tea. Natalie Dormer was splendid, as was Sean Baggerstaff and of course Julia MacKenzie with her masquerade as a dotty old lady and secretly sharp mind was great in her role as the unflappable scourge of every unsuspecting middle-to-upper-class murderer. The costumes, the setting, the score and the camera-work made for a delightful aesthetic which just about overcame the shortcomings in plot and performance.
Al in all, 'Why Didn’t they Ask Evans' delivered what it was supposed to - two hours of camp fun at the end of which an old lady pauses in her knitting to explain everything. It left me fancying a spot of tea and a slice of Victoria sponge, preferably sans snake-venom.
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