Hayley Carmichael (as Alice Mayhew) with Toby Jones (as John Mayhew) in The Witness for the Prosecution for BBC OneRobert Viglasky
The bodies are piling up everywhere. At Sony Pictures, Julian Fellowes is taking a stab at Crooked House. At Disney, Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost is crafting a new Miss Marple. At Twentieth Century Fox, Murder on the Orient Express is in production, with Kenneth Branagh directing himself as Hercule Poirot. And, over at the BBC, the Agatha Christie estate has just committed to seven new television productions over the next four years.
The latest rash of Christie adaptations are all of a piece, and explore the queen of crime's more psychological novels – the ones less concerned with detectives and whodunits and more with the question of why.
"These are about extremes of human behaviour and emotion," says Sarah Phelps, the screenwriter for the new BBC adaptation of The Witness for the Prosecution. And it seems that a time of moral and political uncertainly is ripe to revive them. Witness itself is an atmospheric turn-of-the-screw about postwar desperation of the financial and emotional varieties and, of course, a murder. Given the current appetite for suburban thrillers, unreliable narrators and domestic noir where moral order isn't necessarily restored, the adaptation could well be called The Girl in the Witness Box.
Phelps, a former playwright with the Royal Shakespeare Company who adapted J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy as well as her own The Crimson Field miniseries, agreed to a second Christie project after making a splash with last year's TV adaptation of And Then There Were None. And when we talk, Phelps is at home near London elbows-deep in the grand dame for a third time, at work adapting Ordeal by Innocence.
With Witness (premiering in Canada Jan. 30 online at acorn.tv), it's a tale of sex and money and murder, in which a young war veteran is accused of killing his rich, older lover. "And his only witness is a woman from a broken Europe who nobody really knows at all," Phelps says. "Is Emily French [played by Kim Cattrall] the poor helpless widow, or is she a nymphomaniac hiring young men to be prostitutes?"
In the role of the witness Romaine, Andrea Riseborough puts in a powerful performance as the survivor of a massacre in Liège, and Toby Jones is meek defence attorney Mayhew, shell-shocked by the Great War. It's a courtroom drama, yet Phelps takes it to the darker corners of London and down into Mayhew's grubby basement office and unhappy marriage. The champagne decadence of the era that a traditional adaptation would luxuriate in is stripped away.
That velvet glove of period trappings has often obscured the brutality of Christie's best work and wrongly positioned her as comfort food. "We've become so familiar with Christie it's like a London bus – something you absolutely take for granted. Not having had any prior relationship with her, I think that's meant that I am shocked by her," Phelps, who'd never read or watched a Christie before, adds. "Properly shocked."
"I assumed they were all cozy, safe, here's olde England isn't it lovely," she explains. Her first reading of And Then There Were None left her reeling. "Why it isn't part of the modernist canon I will never truly understand." Read one way, you think, "it's a load of fun, it's a parlour game," and, in another, terrifying. "Even the description of that house is terrifying, as a two-dimensional structure that almost folds in on itself. You get the sense of an Escher drawing, these people scrabbling like terrified rats trying to get away from the obliteration that is coming for them."
When Witness aired in Britain by the BBC in December to critical acclaim, there was a side of controversy for its lurid "scenes of a sexual nature." Sex seems the least of this deadly tale, though. "Somebody tweeted me to ask why I had to include sordid scenes," Phelps says with a laugh. "A murder has just happened – there's brain matter clotted on an instrument that has bludgeoned somebody to death. Incredible violence has occurred and somebody is walking around thinking they're going to get away with it. What on earth makes anyone think Christie is 'cozy'?"
To emphasize this as she did on And Then There Were None, Phelps also ignores Christie's later revisionist upbeat ending and restores her bleaker, cliff-edge finale. For Witness, she relied on the earlier original version rather than the melodramatic alternative made famous in Billy Wilder's 1957 film. "It undermines everything Mayhew believes in the law, all of these great pillars of the establishment, of order, of stability. And I wanted her first thought," she explains, "where all the house of cards of how society works and justice is done have just been swept aside."
From a point of view of moral philosophy and morality tales, Phelps argues that Christie is fascinating and hopes she's in some way rescuing the writer's characters and their stories from the dusty shelf. "Vera Claythorne, in And Then There Were None, is an extraordinary character study. She has murdered a little boy and she's not sorry."
Christie has [a] lot to say that is urgent," Phelps adds. "I'm trying to keep it very much in and of the time it was written, but make it so you get that shiver, that 'Oh my god, they're us.' These people are us, they just don't have WiFi."
Nathalie Atkinson