Spiral 4: State of Terror

Subtitling itself "State of Terror" the fourth iteration of French detective series Spiral, or Engrenages in its native tongue, pointed to its dominant plot thematics right from the opening scenes. The bloodied and dying body of a basement terrorist, accidentally injured by a makeshift bomb of his own manufacturing, is dumped in the streets of Paris by his zealous, nervy co-conspirators.

The Clement/Karlsson partnership

It is the case that the blunderful team of Paris police headed up by the purposeful Laure Berthaud tackle this season, and takes them through a new wave of seedy Parisian underclasses as they chase the origin of the terror threat. They stumble across a misguided student, Sophie Mazarat, hardened by her anarchistic boyfriend, Thomas Riffault, into believing in a cause to champion the immigrant populations of the capital. Mazarat, and the subsequent fruitless chase of the elusive Riffault, drag Berthaud and her mismatched team of Tintin and Gilou through the worlds of the Turkish kingpins controlling the streets, and their social opposites, the squat-dwelling refugees and illegal immigrants living on the fringes of criminality. As the series approaches its explosive conclusion the paranoia of the terrorists is mirrored by a territorial spat between crime squads that threatens to implode the close-knit detective team.

However, despite the plots, sub-plots, side-plots and tangents, the true heart of Spiral is its characters and their story-arcs throughout the series, and indeed through the show since its inception. And while the plot for series four focused on a state of terror, a more fitting subtitle for the main players in the series would have been "State of Cowardice", this being the theme most prevalent throughout the show.

Cowardice was most overt in the journey of the detective Tintin over the 12 episode run. His injury in the line of duty caused a cliched dependence on painkillers, an addiction he was unable to share with anyone until his partner Gilou badgered it out of him. However, his near-miss also led to a form of post-traumatic stress as he first hid to avoid suspects on an arrest, before wavering, unable to shoot his targets during a raid on a squat. The psychologies of trauma temporarily causing his inertia. Likewise, the other members of the core police team suffered their own moments of gutless decisions. For Gilou, his apparent nerve in dealing with his blackmailers masks a deeper sense of fear. Confrontation failed to work, so he reverted to underhand techniques in an attempt to correct the situation for his own preservation motives.

Berthaud is more blatant in her cowardly deceptions. As old flame Samy returns to her life, she refuses to make decisions about her personal life, sleeping with Samy (in the back of his car) before returning home to her increasingly suspicious boyfriend, Vincent. Her emotional torments remind of those in Danish heroine Sara Lund from the popular The Killing. Berthaud is decisive, confrontational and direct when it comes to the workplace, but outside of that environment she frequently falters, avoiding decisions or making poor ones inevitably leading to deception and mistrust.

Sophie Mazarat - dedicated follower of terrorism

The theme of cowardice also seeps through into the terrorist cell as Sophie's dedication to the cause is seen through to its destructive conclusion while Riffault backs out of the plan at the final hour, leaving the city altogether more respectably than he had been when he first appeared. Unable to go through with his despicable plan he shuffles off to leave others to face the consequence of his machinations.

Outside of the police investigation, and meshed together with their plots are the prosecutors, lawyers and judges who see the suspects through the investigations, from questioning to release or prosecution, trials and appeals.

Judge Roban, the Arsene Wenger lookalike and moral backbone of the Spiral universe, finds himself under fire this series. Alleging a campaign of bribery and incompetence against a fellow judge, Roban find himself in the dock as his own integrity and impartiality are called into question. The episode rocks the usually self-righteous and steely Roban, still reeling from the suicide of his unsuitable intern during an earlier series. The judge first finds his interpretations of what is the right course of action challenged, before his whole trust in justice is undermined by a run-in with the Freemasons; the suggestion being that their influence saw him through his own time in the dock and reinstated him in his former high position on the bench. It is an uncomfortable compromise for the rigid judge who becomes unable to confide his predicament to his trusting secretary. With series 5 filming later this year, Roban's procrastinations could take centre stage as he learns to live with the consequences of his actions and inaction.

Lastly, but by no means least, the legal double team of Pierre Clèment and Josèphine Karlsson experience extreme character arcs of their own. After three series of flirting around each other, "State of Terror" begins with the mismatched pair as partners, both in business terms as they share honours in their legal practice, and also romantically. Opposites of each other Clèment has graduated from the school of Roban, always in pursuit of the correct, honourable course. Karlsson, on the other hand, has more dubious motivations, never fully explained, but frequently self-serving and often influenced by money and power.

Series four takes the pair through a series of mutual discoveries as they appear to learn from each other. Clèment's brush with the undesirable and uncontrollable bully Jorkal, sees him flirt with a bravado more typical of Karlsson. A client picked for his clout and financial incentives who is far removed from the usual charitable cases Clèment takes on, Jorkal's obvious insincerity and outright criminality jeopardises the reputation of the naively righteous lawyer. It is a situation that spirals beyond Clèment's control, ill-equipped as he is for the consequences of dealing with such organised criminals.

Contrastingly, Karlsson's primary case, the defending of an illegal immigrant desperately trying to keep his employment to avoid being deported, is a more-typical Clèment defendant. It appears that her time with Pierre has taught her a modicum of integrity severely lacking in her character previously. As more is revealed of her background and motivations, she is given a sense of heart that manifests itself primarily as an altruistic act as she warns the illegal squat ahead of a police raid. Her act, born out of defiance of authority can be traced back to her family, and relationship with her father. The excruciating family function she drags Clèment along to eventually reveals her inherent vulnerability and neediness and this desire to be wanted is what informs her decision to tip off Riffault's cohorts at the squat.

Paris's finest: Gilou, Tintin, Berthaud and Samy

What is unfortunate, then, is that this altruistic act ultimately causes her to lose the one source of acceptance that she most needs - that of Clèment. As the anti-terror unit recruit her to spy on Riffault for them, threatening to reveal her criminal indiscretion to her partner, she is left with no choice but to comply with their wishes. The subsequent revelation jeopardises her professional and personal relationship with Clèment, and she attempts suicide as she reaches the limits of her desperation.

Her subsequent course of action, the decision to pursue a more professional strategy to salvage the case of her immigrant client, eventually proves successful for her, affording her a rare opportunity to smile as she relishes the community's acceptance. That this also leads to a reconciliation for Karlsson and Clèment allows the two of them a chance of a happy ending.

For the rest of the cast, Sophie's bombing of the police HQ, killing Samy and throwing Berthaud into hysterics, the ending was far from happy. Series 5 has a lot of mending that it needs to commission before they can start to pick up the pieces of their broken department.

The Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey / Richard III: The King in the Car Park

The NPG Portrait analysed by Grant

"Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority".  Such are the words attributed to Sir Francis Bacon that lend themselves to the title of Josephine Tey's swansong detective Alan Grant mystery The Daughter of Time.  Bacon's phrase alludes to the nature of accounts, of what information gets reported, digested and ultimately sustained over the course of history, and how time can turn those received beliefs upon themselves and question whether truths may actually be falsities.

This is the central hook of Tey's mystery.  Her detective is prostrate in hospital, bored with the banality of his surroundings and itching to find something to occupy his mind.  An actress friend of his suggests that in the absence of any real-life criminals he can chase down, he turns his detective mind instead to an historical mystery, Mary Queen of Scots, for example, or the royal pretender Perkin Warbeck.  The detective, noted for his ability to analyse faces with accuracy of their guilt or innocence, their physiognomy, is presented with a series of portraits, and it is amongst these that the National Portrait Gallery's painting of King Richard III catches his eye.  Here is a man famed for the atrocities accompanying his rise to power and his reign and immortalised as a grotesque by Shakespeare.  Yet his portrait causes Grant to ponder the question: is this man more likely to be in the dock, or on the bench?  A criminal, or an adjudicator?  Grant's decision to discover the answer to this question forces him to approach the dilemma as a detective, utilising a friend to scour the British Library for contemporary sources to discover whether Richard could have been responsible for the most infamous crime attributed to him, the murder of the two Princes in the Tower.

Tey's novel is currently enjoying a renaissance following the recent Leicester University declaration that the skeleton unearthed from a car park in the city is that of the last Plantagenet King.  The documentary accompanying the discovery, Channel 4's Richard III: The King in the Car Park, told the story of the dig for Richard's remains from the point of view of the Ricardians who support the claims that Richard was innocent of much of the wrongdoing reported of him, and the archaeologists tasked with excavating the site where he was calculated to have been interred.

The documentary, narrated on- and off-screen by Horrible Histories actor Simon Farnaby, hit many emotional notes, suggesting that although he was afflicted by a degree of the deformity of legend, the manner of his death and burial reveals a deeply respected individual, his bones found in front of where the alter would have stood in the priory foundations.  However, as a factual account of the excavations, it fell short in addressing any mysteries surrounding the 15th century king's reputation.

The Ricardians, fronted by the evangelical Philippa Langley, were painted as deluded in their quest to restore Richard's reputation, while Leicester University was shown as error-strewn, their chief archaeologist hammering through the skull of the king in a botched inital excavation.  Likewise, the documentary didn't go far enough to ascertain the reasons behind the possibility that the king was interred in the location, choosing to suggest that a moment of paranormal whimsy from the apparently obsessive Langley was enough to force the University to part with hundreds of thousands of pounds in the quest for his bones.  Little was actually investigated in the documentary, exception the nature of determination, and the odd phrase such as, "is this the face of a killer?" were the only attempts to suggest that the story of Richard III may not be that which Shakespeare chose to tell us and has passed over into public consciousness.

Tey's The Daughter of Time goes much further than the documentary had license to go.  Fictionalising the quest for the truth of Richard III's reign it takes the legend of the Princes in the Tower, the disappearance of the successors to the throne of Edward IV, the boy king Edward V and his younger brother Richard Duke of York, immortalised forever through Shakespeare's hand and John Milais 1878 painting, and analyses the evidence for and against Richard III as the perpetrator of their kidnapping and probable murder.

A b/w version of Milais' Princes

Approaching the case from a police point of view, Grant considers extant manuscripts that report aspects of Richard's life alongside the more familiar testimonies of Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare to ascertain whether he, as a police investigator, would convict Richard III of the crime based on the facts in front of him.  He looks as existing documents and portrayals written by contemporaries of Richard III alongside those penned by his successors, and modern literature and academic dissertations into the life of the king.  His conclusions inevitably raise questions of Richard's participation in the disappearance of the young heir, and even go so far as to suggest that his successor, the "usurper" Henry Tudor, later Henry VII who invaded from France and eventually eliminated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth was the true instigator of the disappearance of the juvenile Princes.

Truth, in Tey's novel, is besmirched by the propaganda of the Tudors, re-imagining Richard as a violent homicidal monster to perpetrate their own loose claim to the throne of England.  The authority of Bacon's "authors" being the defining factor in the narrative of Richard III's history.  However, her novel is a considerably one-sided affair.  It dismisses almost too easily contradictory evidence, such as one monk's writings of the myth of Richard's hand in the kidnapping of Edward IV's sons.  But it does present an interesting study into the methods of historical determination, linking them in to criminal investigations to suggest an outcome.

The premise of approaching history or a historical conceit from a judicial standpoint is a novel one.  Can you convict a suspect of a crime based on the evidence, testimony and circumstance presented?  Are certain testimonies dubious because they were written long after the event, commissioned by parties involved in the investigation or coloured by the unreliability of political bias?  Tey presents Richard III in a different light than that of received lore, fictionalising the truism that history is written by the victors.  While her methods suggest that she is a precursor of the Ricardian society as it exists today, perhaps accepting the versions that agree with her interpretations all too easily while dismissing those that contradict with equal ease.

Afflicted with Richard III's spinal deformity

The Daughter of Time is, however, one of the gems of the detective genre, effortlessly blending a historical narrative into a modern interpretation of detective fiction.  Whether you agree kith her conclusions or not, it is hard not to admire the research the author went through to ascertain Richard III's history and his sucessors' contribution to received "wisdom" about the last Plantagenet king.

History, it would seem, is the property of the victors, but Tey's novel, and Langley's quest for the true King Richard III go some way to suggesting that there is much to the tale of the "Hunchback King"* that warrants considered and unbiased investigation.

*Channel 4's documentary revealed that Richard III's spine was considerably deformed, the king suffering from an s-curve of the bone formation believed to be scoliosis.  While they didn't delve too far into this condition, it is known that one of the most famous sufferers of the spinal condition is Usian St. Leo Bolt, the World's Fastest Man, double Olympic Champion at both 100m and 200m.  The condition that afflicted Richard III may not be as disfiguring and as debilitating as popular culture may suggest.

Bolt image: Nick Webb via Wikipedia
The Princes in the Tower, by Sir John Everett Milais, currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, via Wikipedia (Public Domain)
Richard III, artist unknown, currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, via Wikipedia (Public Domain)

Jane and the Damned - Janet Mullany

"High concept" is a term that often gets thrown around as a substitute for originality. Frequently though, it fails in transferring the succinctness of its ideas to full, cohesive and adequately-formed entertainment.

The ultimate high concept film was 2006's Snakes on a Plane, the title summing up the movie's premise as perfectly as any fiction has ever been compartmentalised before. In the hands of a skilled scriptwriter it may have become a horror classic, a serpentine Jaws perhaps, or an Alien-esque study of claustrophobia. Unfortunately, its winning concept is so constricted by a writhing mess of CGI snakes, limp and partially-formed characters and a tired, obvious plot that not even some choice expletives from Samuel L Jackson can save it from the certain suffocation its abstraction administers.

Janet Mullany's Jane of the Damned takes as its premise a similarly high concept, albeit one with a more literary bent. It leaches off the current vogue for historic and literary reinvention into fantasy, turning icons into characters that inhabit worlds of zombies, witches, vampires and fairytales. Not even former presidents immune from cameoing in such conceits, Abraham Lincoln being recast as a vampire-hunter in a recent film.

Jane of the Damned isn't the first time that Jane Austen has been transported into the fantasy genre. Author Seth Grahame-Smith previously turned the author's Regency classic Pride and Prejudice into a zombie farce, taking chunks of the original text and plot and passing them through a mash-up processor. The resulting experiment places the undead throughout the Bennet universe, playfully swapping out dances and ladylike pursuits for martial arts training and gun wielding. Its unexpectedness injecting it with a quirky originality.

Such characteristics are sadly lacking from Mullany's foray into the genre. She imagines Austen herself as a Regency dame, chewing her pen as she churns out sub-standard romances as an aspiring author, drawing on her noted skills of wit and story-telling.   After being bitten by a vampire she is forced to deal with the stigma that now colour her non-existence. This inconvenience refocuses her attentions first into a military prowess, and then into an improved author.

There is something innately irrelevant about the novel, and not just through its fiction. It feels as though it is battering itself into a tired genre that is barely putting up any resistance. Its humour falls woefully short of Jasper Fforde's heights, and it is rarely as clever as it thinks it is being. A pedestrian plot of love and war envelop its unlikely heroine, negating any suspense amid overlong interludes. It plays the vampire card far too early to allow the reader to invest any sympathies in Jane or those around her, and the turmoils that the virgin vampire experiences rarely develop beyond their simplest dichotomies.

It may be time for authors to cease their playing around with historical treasures and fantasy worlds, and instead turn high concept into readability and watchable drama. Alternatively, they should perhaps steer clear of committing their big ideas to print until they have at least studied Fforde's Thursday Next series to establish a bench mark to aspire towards.

Shakespeare's New Year's Resolutions

Ah Shakespeare ... sage playwright that he was.

"Borrowed" from the No Sweat Shakespeare blog, here are 10 New Year's Resolutions cribbed from the Bard's works.

Forbrydelsen III

After 40 episodes of North Sea knitwear, warehouses illuminated only by ineffectual torchlight and a shoal of the reddest kind of herring, Sarah Lund has flown away from the world of Forbrydelsen. The Killing, to use its Anglicised title, has finally reached its conclusion, a shocking series of events marking its departure.

Its final episodes, #9 and #10 of the third series, were nothing short of remarkable, plunging their heroine into a spectrum of emotions from hopeful matriarchy to despondency and judgementalism. After chasing a child kidnapper for 8 episodes, before which she had already attempted to "retire" to a desk job but had been coaxed out to investigate one last case, Lund came face-to-face with an evil that sat beyond regular justice, if not sanctioned then at least ignored by a government-backed corporation. In the wake of her own parental shortcomings and unhappinesses, the Copenhagen policewoman sacrificed a familial reconciliation with her son and new grandchild and a chance of normality with an old flame to mete out a fatal vigilante justice to the paedophile unearthed by her investigations. It was a strikingly bleak outcome to Lund's story arc; just when she was reaching hope her devotion to making her county a safer place dashed all opportunities for her own personal happiness as her unprovoked execution flipped her, turning her into a criminal, a murderer no better than those she sought to bring to justice. The scene in the hospital, when she was pulled away from the doorway of the delivery room by an urgent police phone call was poignant in its timing but tinged the final minutes with the inevitability of a bleak outcome for Lund.

Lund's final actions, perhaps, are the true "crime" of the title.* Not a crime of passion, or a crime of convenience, but a crime of necessity - the only way to punish a criminal whose actions are not acted upon by authorities and regular forms of justice. It is a theme that has drifted through all three series of the show, echoing her self-defense in the second series and bringing her full circle with the first where she pleaded, unsuccessfully, with a father not to shoot the killer of his teenage daughter.

In many ways the rippling effects of that crime permeated this series, both in their superficial similarities and their effect on Lund herself and her relationships with those closest to her. And Forbrydelsen has been expert at meshing together political worlds, media, police and domestic plot threads. There were no "filler" episodes across the three series, no misplaced plot lines that amounted to nothing. Everything interwove, from the causes of the crimes to their investigations and their revelations all played out in the grey world of rainy Copenhagen. The show meticulously blended its various threads leaving little feeling superficial or irrelevant, from familial relationships to political spin-doctoring. It all fitted in together, enriching the series and enlightening the denouement.

It is a shame that three series is all that Danish TV have given us, but it is right that it has ended: Lund's story has been completed and could become stale if constantly regurgitated. Forbrydelsen, therefore, sits head and shoulders above the rest of televisual drama. its blueprints hopefully being used to build the foundations of better and more intelligent series than those currently peddled in the UK and the US.

*Although the UK title of the show is "The Killing", a more literal translation of the Danish Forbrydelsen would be "The Crime".

Full English

An attempt to recreate the successes and style of American family-based animations (King of the Hill, American Dad and, most critically, the quintessential example of the genre, Family Guy) Full English, although occupying the same slot in the schedules, falls short in recreating either the humour or the minutia of detail of its trans-Atlantic cousins.

A family-based cartoon, it takes as its foundation a suburban middle class English couple (Edgar - voiced by Richard Ayoade; and Wendy) and their three teen children - the hapless Dusty, body-conscious emo Eve and the youngest sibling, the awkward Jason.  In the family mix is Ken, Wendy's father and Edgar's boss, a tycoon lacking a moral compass and haunted by an amorphous green blob.  The inclusion of Squidge, the imaginary friend, hints at the try-hard nature of the show - an obvious attempt to recreate the talking dog/talking baby charm of Family Guy.  However, it falls short in its execution.  Squidge just isn't that attractive a character - there's none of the wisdom of Brian, nor the psychosis of Stewie to add any dimension to Squidge who remains a formless, characterless, expressionless underdevelopment of an idea.

In many ways, much of the shows failings could be attributable to something akin to homage - the transposing of the adult cartoon sitcom genre from America to Great Britain.  Its characters seem to be tinged with elements of over-familiarity.  But they rarely live up to the wit or innovation of their American cousins.

The primary offender is undoubtedly Edgar, the weak father of the family, domineered by his father-in-law and exasperated by his children.  Voiced with sarcasm by Ayoade, Edgar may spout the odd dry one-liner in response to a situation, but he lacks the jovial narcissism of Peter Griffin or the upstanding moral high ground of Hank Hill for example, or even the well-meaning buffoonery of Homer Simpson.  Edgar is just a dull middle-aged man with a pot-belly and a family of stereotypes.  And if the main character in a sitcom isn't someone that interests the viewer then the rest of the show is equally doomed.

Whether the miss-hit characterisation is due to unimaginative plotting, or overarching character flaws is up for debate, but it does make the show appear as a supermarket value version in comparison to the premium shows it attempts to stand beside.  In addition, it also suffers from an inability to translate any of its comedic wit, which in better hands could be dynamite, beyond puerility.  Full English is best avoided in its entirety  if any funny bits make it into the show, it would be best to catch up with them in 2 minute bites on YouTube, 

The Merry Wives of Windsor (RSC)

Mistress Ford entertains an expectant Falstaff

There are many things wrong with Phillip Breen's adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, currently playing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre this winter, not least of which is the source material.

Shakespeare's play, written in 1602, is rarely considered one of his best. A spin-off from an era before spin-offs were invented, popular lore speculates that it was a rushed attempt to cash in on the popularity of the character Sir John Falstaff, last seen hanging his head in disbelief as Prince Hal disowned him in Henry IV ii before ascending the throne in Henry V. Theories suggest it was written to a deadline upon request, possibly by a royal theatre patron, and consequently it suffers from a sense of being slapdash, as although there is a partial resolution of the main storyline, interwoven subplots and supporting characters mesh poorly with Falstaff's escapades.

It is a brave director then who elects to take Merry Wives to the stage, and an even braver one to schedule it in the wake of last summer's Troilus and Cressida debacle, one of the most ill-received of the RSC's Shakespeare adaptations in recent memory. Breen makes a reasonable attempt at staging the play, which is by no means as tangled a mess of miscalculations as the walkout-inducing Wooster Group co-production of Troilus and Cressida. However, he cannot prevent the feelings that the Anne Page love quadrangle is predominantly filler to the main Falstaff philandering and humiliation. Even the comedic Mistress Quickly (Anita Dobson) episodes played with the preposterous Dr. Caius cause the play and therefore this production to drag. Breen hasn't found a way to integrate these strands of the play successfully, making them appear like humdrum episodes in an American TV drama, bulking out the episode count before converging awkwardly towards a denouement.

There is no ignoring, then, that parts of this adaptation seem unnecessarily tangential. Less forgivable, though, is the cumbersome staging. In the newly refurbished RST main stage, the thrust stage could have been put to good use to play to the theatregoers at the sides of the stage. As it is, the performances are largely delivered to those with a front-on view; the side-on seats missing out on many expressions of the actors. In addition, on numerous occasions the action extends behind the proscenium arch, again hindering the ticket-holders unfortunate enough to be sitting side-on to the stage with a limited view. At £39 per ticket this kind of inconsiderate staging is wearisome.

The staging as a whole is cumbersome - edifices drop down from the ceiling, steps open up from below, facades, trees, rugby posts and even a fully stocked tavern (complete with boxes of McCoy crisps under the bar) roll in from the wings. At times it seems excessive, as though the director cannot rely on his actors to deliver the correct tone for a scene, or the audience to make the necessary imaginative leap without signposting everything in a televisual manner.

Staging unsubtly and Bardic mediocrity aside, the play does triumph through individual performances. Updating to a modern setting, Alexandra Gilbreath and Sylvestra le Touzel exude soccer-mum friendship as Mistresses Ford and Page respectively.  Gilbreath, who often has the ability to polarize audiences during more sombre, tragic performances hits a perfect note with the comedy in this play.  Never have the Mistresses been funnier in their lampooning of the lusty chancer Sir John Falstaff (with Desmond Barrit adding his measure to the "love triangle").  Of all the updating that Breen has done to the play, it is most inspired through the believability of Gilbreath (the saucy one) and le Touzel (the sensible one) as the 40-something married women looking to enjoy themselves in the face of their husbands' balding ordinariness.  The titular characters are the true heart of this show, which is difficult considering the gargantuan figure of Falstaff on stage.

Barrit's performance is also a highlight, maintaining the right balance between the Falstaff of Henry IV part i, drunken, lascivious buffoon, and the pathos afforded him by his treatment in part ii and his punishments here.  He may be a grotesque, overweight knight in the play, but he's a whole lot more interesting than the carbon-copy, middle-class, dinner party friendly husbands that Mistresses Ford and Page usually spend their days waiting around for.

Remembering that the play is a comedy, Breen's updating is a triumph in this respect, bringing out the laughs through some inspired casting and stand out performances from the three leads.  It is unfortunate, therefore, that the director doesn't grant his lead actors enough trust to carry the play with their talents and relies instead on gimmicky and over-the-top staging.

Image from the RSC website
The Merry Wives of Windsor is showing at the RSC until January 12 2013.