Edwin Drood

 

Dickens’s famously unfinished last novel gets the BBC treatment.  For those seeking comfort, his stocks-in-trade are mostly to be found: aptly-named characters, Cockney urchins and grubby old drunks, and coincidental love-interests.  Where ‘Drood’ differs from the rest is in its lack of a sympathetic central character.  The main trio of Edwin (Freddie Fox), Rosa (Tamzin Merchant) and Edwin’s Uncle John Jasper (Matthew Rhys) are all in need of a good shake, though at least Rosa comes to her senses towards the end of the first episode of two.

This made the unfolding drama less gripping than it might have been, and we can’t help but speculate as to whether Dickens would have revised and re-written swathes of it, as he often did after first serialisation.  Or maybe, in his declining years, he decided to shade his characters a little differently.  There is a lovely atmosphere of darkness, perfect for a winter evening, and as usual it all looks sumptuous but we’re not sure about the casting.  Fox is boy-band pretty with a voice to match, and does it really add anything to have the Landless twins as mixed race?  We’re not talking about colour-blind casting – their ‘foreign’ nature is a key narrative feature – but Dickens wasn’t explicit about whether they were Colonial British and seen as inferior for that reason, which was a very real prejudice of his times.  OK, it’s quibbling, and the hour rollicked along with everything pointing towards the perfect solution of Neville Landless (Sacha Dhawan) marrying Rosa, his sister Helena (Amber Rose Revah) marrying Rev. Crisparkle (Rory Kinnear), Edwin growing up a bit and Jasper suffering eternally for his impure thoughts.  Castration might be a safer solution for Rosa, but we doubt Dickens would ever have made that particular revision....

Being a 19^th Century novel, however, ‘downhill’ doesn’t mean an easy ride, and we were left with a scene of Jasper apparently carrying out his laudanum-induced desires of murdering Edwin, believing him to be a rival for Rosa.  So, is Edwin really dead at Jasper’s hands?  Will Neville be blamed?  Has it left Rosa vulnerable to the unwelcome attentions of her music master?  Dickens wrote more, with his usual large cast of characters, and even hinted at an ending, but it’s been left to screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes to script her own conclusion.  It may be hard to please Dickens purists, but at least anything she comes up with won’t be any more outlandish than anything written by the great man himself.