And Then There Were
None was commissioned by Ben Stephenson and Charlotte Moore for the
BBC to mark the 125th anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth. The
adaptation was produced by Mammoth Screen in partnership with Agatha
Christie Productions.
Writer Sarah Phelps
told the BBC that she was shocked by the starkness and brutality of
the novel. Comparing the novel to Christie's other work, she stated,
"Within the Marple and Poirot stories somebody is there to
unravel the mystery, and that gives you a sense of safety and
security, of predicting what is going to happen next... In this book
that doesn't happen – no one is going to come to save you,
absolutely nobody is coming to help or rescue or interpret".
Filming began in
July 2015. Cornwall was used for many of the harbour and beach
scenes, including Holywell Bay, Kynance Cove, and Mullion Cove.
Harefield House in Hillingdon, outside London, served as the location
for the island mansion. Production designer Sophie Beccher decorated
the house in the style of 1930s designers like Syrie Maugham and
Elsie de Wolfe. Railway scenes were filmed at the South Devon Railway
between Totnes and Buckfastleigh.
And Then There Were
None was a ratings success for the BBC, with the first episode
netting over 6 million viewers and becoming the second most watched
programme on Boxing Day. Each of the two subsequent episodes netted
over 5 million viewers.
Despite criticism
ahead of the programme's launch from the Daily Mail that the
production deviated from Agatha Christie's source material, And Then
There Were None received critical acclaim. Ben Dowell of the Radio
Times gave a positive review. Jasper Reese for The Daily Telegraph
gave the first episode 4 out of 5 stars, calling it a "pitch-black
psychological thriller as teasing murder mystery" and
"spiffingly watchable". Reviewing the first episode, UK
daily newspaper The Guardian's Sam Wollaston noted, "[…] it
also manages to be loyal, not just in plot but in spirit as well. I
think the queen of crime would approve. I certainly do. Mass murder
rarely gets as fun as this." Reviewing the final episode for The
Daily Telegraph, Tim Martin also gave it 4 out of 5 stars, calling it
a "class act", and praising the adaptation for highlighting
the darkness of Christie's novel, which he noted no previous
adaptation had attempted.
1 "Episode
1" Craig Viveiros Sarah Phelps 26 December 2015
In August 1939,
seven strangers are invited to a weekend house party on Soldier
Island by the anonymous Mr. & Mrs. U.N. Owen, along with domestic
staff, Mr. & Mrs. Rogers, and Vera Claythorne, who has been
offered a secretarial post. There is no host to greet them but Rogers
is instructed to play a record, which names them all as being
responsible for a death for which they were not caught and punished.
There is the children's rhyme Ten Little Soldiers in each room and
ten miniature figures of soldiers on the dining room table. One of
the guests is revealed to be an impostor but then another dies in the
manner of the first little soldier and next day a second victim is
claimed in the same way and two of the model soldiers have been
removed.
2 "Episode
2" Craig Viveiros Sarah Phelps 27 December 2015
Two Jade figurines
out of a set of ten found on the dining table are missing, arousing
suspicion from the other eight that one of them is the murderer. They
realise that whoever left the mysterious message intends to make good
on their threat, according to the rules of the nursery rhyme Ten
Little Soldiers. After three more deaths, and with three more
figurines gone, the survivors band together to search all the rooms
and belongings to unmask the killer and save themselves.
3 "Episode
3" Craig Viveiros Sarah Phelps 28 December 2015
Five of the original
ten are left. Following the death of another, the four left become
hysterical, thinking of their fate, drinking and taking drugs. In the
night, one escapes the house, leaving the other three to believe he
is the killer. Two more figurines disappear. A body is found on the
beach. The real truth of their crimes come to the fore as the eighth
guest is found dead, and the final two turn on each other
BBC’s
And Then There Were None puts a darker spin on Agatha Christie
Screenwriter
Sarah Phelps on why her tougher take on murder works as festive fare
– and how it differs from Midsomer Murders or Poirot
Tara
Conlan
Sunday
13 December 2015 18.00 GMT
If you are expecting
to settle down on the sofa to watch a cosy Agatha Christie whodunnit
when And Then There Were None begins on BBC1 on Boxing Day, then
think again. As Sarah Phelps, who has adapted the gripping novel
about justice, points out, “this book is genuinely terrifying ...
nobody is coming to save you ... no dapper Belgian detective, no
twinkly-eyed and steely spinster is going to arrive and unravel it.”
While the cast,
which includes Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson, Charles Dance and Aidan
Turner, might lull viewers into thinking this is just another
star-studded murder mystery, Phelps says they should be prepared for
something much darker “that gets that little vulnerable spot in
your brain and goes ...” (she mimes turning something).
Although her scripts
contain humour, she says the book, which she had not read before,
“profoundly shocked” her and is more “terrifying and brutal”
than she expected. It is “searing” in the same way as
Scandinavian dramas such as The Killing and The Bridge are, in
contrast to other dramas that use death as an entertaining plot
device.
Phelps, who
previously wrote the celebrated 2011 adaptation of Great Expectations
starring Douglas Booth, Ray Winstone and Gillian Anderson for the
BBC, explains: “Whenever we think of Murder She Wrote, Midsomer
Murders, Poirot, Marple, [it’s] murder as entertainment – teatime
entertainment – isn’t that weird?
“Those shows are
kind of ‘Argh, I’ve been killed with a letter opener to the eye’,
it’s [about] the unravelling of the plot and the life is
irrelevant. In this book you take all that, murder as entertainment,
and you turn it on its head [and say] ‘this is an abomination, this
is the wrath of God’.”
She continues: “What
this does, and the Scandi dramas do, is they go, ‘This is what
murder is. Murder is an absolutely horrific crime. You have taken a
life.’”
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The plot of And Then
There Were None (slight spoiler alert) revolves around 10 people
invited to an island off the south coast of England by a mysterious
host just before the outbreak of the second world war. While cut off
by bad weather they are reminded of murderous sins they have
committed and carefully killed off one by one in the style of the
American poem Ten Little Indians.
Phelps, who
translated JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy to the small screen last
year and is currently distilling her detective novel The Cuckoo’s
Calling, sees parallels in Christie’s most popular novel with dark,
remorseless plays such as Euripides’ Medea or Sophocles’ Electra
– which she saw performed as part of a trilogy at Edinburgh more
than 20 years ago.
“When I was
writing I kept thinking of the Greeks, thinking of the
remorselessness and the poem as actually a Greek chorus: ‘You’re
not going anywhere, you’re pinned, you’re fixed, here is the eye
of God, it doesn’t blink, look at you squirm.’ It’s
terrifying.”
Merry Christmas
viewers! “Exactly,” she laughs and mimics an announcer’s voice:
“Anyway boys and girls, now it’s time for Agatha Christie’s And
Then There Were None. Enjoy! Just be glad you’re not them.”
“Marple and Poirot
are giants of characters,” Phelps adds, “but I think this book
has a worrying purity to it because of the beauty of the plot. And
there’s a real dark, murky, curious, difficult undertone which just
makes you think about what it means to take a life.
“At what point
does judgment stop being dispassionate and start becoming psychotic?
Does anybody really deserve this? Are we really this entertained by
the concept of murder?
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“There is
something else ... the most forensic examination of guilt,
transgression. It’s a portrait of a psychopath, even you might say
a portrait of the writer as psychopath but that’s another
meta-question.”
She was also aware
of the timing of the story, written in 1939 “a few short weeks
before war is declared” and that the characters “are products of
the first world war, of that madness ... and the loss of status - the
posturings of Empire are over and they are the last gasp of it.”
Although she changed
how The Casual Vacancy ended, Phelps says it was important to stay
faithful to Christie’s plot and “not do something like Big
Brother”, keeping the author’s principle that death “had to
mean something.”
“You have to be
faithful to Christie because she’s making you think about really
important moral points.”
With the support of
Christie’s family there have been a few “tiny” changes,
including how some of the characters die or their locations when
murders occur.
She says she has
“ramped up” some elements: “Everyone in the book is quite
polite and clipped. They’re a whole lot less so in the adaptation
because I kept thinking ‘what would you do if you were on an island
and people kept dying?’. I think I’d be bouncing off the walls at
some point.”
Phelps, who started
out as a polo groom and worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company
before joining EastEnders, was given a pretty free rein, although “at
one point I had some pretty strong language in there and [was told]
you’re not going to get away with a particular word which I thought
would’ve been a brilliant payoff.”
She entertainingly
recounts the subsequent exchange she had with an executive from the
BBC who told her: “Sarah, we’re not having that.”
“‘Why not?’ I
said. ‘It’s perfect for the character.’”
“He went: ‘You
cannot have “cunt” in this.’”
“‘Why not? Of
course you can, it’ll be brilliant for the character.’”
“‘Sarah, it’s
Christmas. We’re not having “cunt” at Christmas.’”
“So I was like,
‘Yes all right, fair point’”.
The three-part
drama, made by Poldark producer Mammoth Screen, marks the return of
Turner to BBC1. Phelps worked with him briefly before on BBC3’s
comedy drama Being Human. She says he was “lovely [and] fantastic”
and was filming And Then There Were None in Cornwall just as Poldark
(also filmed there) hit screens so “people would walk by
restaurants and do a double take”.
Having not known
much about Christie before, Phelps – who is also working on an
original “kind of” period piece following the untimely demise of
her first world war drama The Crimson Field – is set to adapt
Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution for the BBC.
So hold onto your
Santa hats: And Then There Were None could be the start of more
risque Christies at Christmas.
And
Then There Were None: BBC's new Agatha Christie adaptation would make
the queen of crime proud
'It is a really
profoundly disturbing and anguishing psychological thriller'
Gerard Gilbert
@GerardVGilbert Sunday 20 December 2015
In a meticulously
designed Art Deco drawing room, actors dressed in 1930s formal wear
are standing around with cocktails to hand, discussing murder.
Outwardly you couldn’t get much more Agatha Christie than this
scene, but, as Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot both know, appearances
can be deceptive, and BBC1’s new three-part adaptation of
Christie’s And Then There Were None aims to hold its own with such
dark contemporary crime dramas as Luther and The Bridge. But is
rebooting the classic English murder mystery for the era of
Scandinavian noir trying to square the circle?
You shouldn’t even
try, according to an aghast Mail on Sunday, which recently asked of
this new adaptation: “What HAS the BBC done to Agatha Christie?”
It went on to warn that “Christmas viewers will be stunned by
controversial new adaptation featuring drugs, gruesome violence and
the F-word”.
“It doesn’t
totally surprise me that the Mail says that, but I don’t agree,”
says Agatha Christie’s great grandson, James Pritchard, chairman of
the company that manages the author’s literary estate. “I think
[the BBC version] is remarkably true to the work and whilst there may
be elements of it that are interpretations or slight adaptations, I
don’t think it strays very far from the original concept and mood.”
First published in
November 1939 as Ten Little Niggers – the title swiftly made more
palatable for its US publication – And Then There Were None is
considered to be Christie’s masterpiece, and is the bestselling
crime novel of all time. Sarah Phelps, who recently adapted J K
Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy for the BBC, and who was commissioned
to write this screenplay, was shocked by the book’s brutality.
“It is a really
profoundly disturbing and anguishing psychological thriller,” she
says. “I found it shocking at how cold it was – the brutal
nature of justice. Justice is coming, and justice will be served and
it will be painful.”
The story involves a
group of 10 people lured to an island off the coast of Devon by a
mysterious certain UN Owen, each of them harbouring a guilty secret.
In the scene that I’m watching being filmed in a disused mansion on
the outskirts of London, each of the invitees – having had their
crimes detailed on a gramophone record – are busy declaring their
innocence. It soon becomes clear, however, that they are going to be
picked off one by one by an unknown assailant.
The Mail article
attacks what it sees as “gruesome violence” and quotes an Agatha
Christie expert, Dr John Curran, who says: “In a Christie novel,
people died off stage. There is no description of graphic death”.
James Pritchard
says: “Whilst with my great-grandmother most of the murders tended
to happen off stage, you cannot get away from the fact that she
killed a lot of people.”
Hilary Strong, CEO
of Agatha Christie Ltd, which began the process of repositioning the
Christie television brand away from ITV’s “cosy” Miss Marples
and Poirots with David Walliams’s Partners in Crime series, notes
that the novel And Then There Were None was written just before the
Second World War, while Christie adapted it for the stage in 1945.
“The play was
written just after the war and the theatre came back to her and said
we can’t cope with the ending,” says Strong. “People had just
had enough of brutality.”
The cast of the new
BBC production includes Charles Dance, Toby Stephens, Miranda
Richardson, Anna Maxwell-Martin, Sam Neill, Australian newcomer Maeve
Dermody and man of the moment, Poldark’s Aidan Turner, who plays
Philip Lombard, a mercenary who has been accused off gunning down 21
innocent tribesmen in Africa.
“Coming from
someone like Ross Poldark to Philip Lombard is like going to play the
other side of the character spectrum,” he says. “It was a nice
change to play somebody who doesn’t really care about anyone but
himself.”
And it’s a nice
change for Turner to use his natural Irish accent – “Just to add
to the ambiguity,” he says. “He enters the house and is the only
one carrying a pistol, and as Sarah Phelps said, there’s nothing
more frightening than an Irish guy in 1939 with a gun.”
Except perhaps a
German with a gun. Sam Neill, who plays General MacArthur, a retired
First World War hero guilty of sending his late wife’s lover to his
certain death, agrees: “This book is set on the cusp of the Second
World War, and that must have been very much on Agatha Christie’s
mind,” he says. “It takes a darker turn that you might normally
expect,” he says, a sentiment echoed by other cast members.
Charles Dance, who
plays retired Justice Wargrave (“he was not a merciful judge”)
hasn’t read the book and doesn’t intend to. “I don’t if I’m
working on an adaptation,” he says. “In her script Sarah has
assembled a group of characters that are all completely
three-dimensional, and that’s rare in crime genres. The whole thing
is really rather beautifully rounded. Christie keeps you guessing
until the last possible moment.”
‘And Then There
Were None’ begins on Boxing Day on BBC1 at 9pm
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