What got me so strongly about this brilliant drama is the fact that I’d never heard a whiff of it before. The lack of attention and comment goes to standards as this is easy to overlook, but for the wrong reasons. For a start it starts very slowly, almost nothing happens for a good long while.
Because it’s a slow starter it would be easy to turn off. I read on the internet that it got good reviews but personally nobody had ever said anything about it in my purview of attention.
Genocide is a hard topic to treat.
The drama manages to do it well because of some fine acting but the main thing for me is the script. It’s tight as a drum, with short scenes often remotely connected though lying side by side. You are dragged from one character to another as you try to fit the pieces together. This puzzle-like characteristic suited me down to the ground.
John Goodman is great as Michael Innis playing opposite Michaela Coel’s Kate Ashby, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide living and working in London as a legal investigator. Innis is a lawyer as is Kate’s mother Eve (Harriet Walker).
This is realpolitik and I have no way of knowing how accurate or not the scenario is but it felt good. There are some wonderful performances relating to people in power including Abena Ayivor’s President Mundanzi and her colleague David Runihura (Lucian Msumati) who do it very convincingly with an overlay of oily charm that has the right astringency to make you feel uneasy about them. I particularly liked these liminal spaces that are explored in the drama. Another standout is Immanuel Imani who plays a young man who used to be a child soldier.
Because the show talks about crime there are secrets, and this makes viewing the drama compulsive. Everyone wants to know more about things that touch them closely, and the secrets that these characters carry inside them are laden with portent. There is a gravitas inhering in this program that stems from history’s blackest source.
No comments:
Post a Comment