Poirot and Miss Marple
are two British TV series I keep meaning to get around to. I enjoy poking through favorite actors'
filmographies on IMDb, and it didn't take me long to realize that oodles of
excellent British actors have guest-starred in at least one of these two
shows. Matthew Macfadyen, Jack
Davenport, and Fenella Woolgar are just a few of the actors who've gotten their
Agatha Christie on. And of course, since
“Wasps' Nest” is popping up here, so has PC.
In
“Wasps' Nest,” the great Belgian detective runs into his old friend John at a
village fete and immediately begins to notice uneasy circumstances. John has a beautiful fiancée with a jilted
ex, there's a sinister-looking stranger lurking about, and a jar of cyanide can
kill more than just wasps. There's no
murder to speak of yet, but Poirot is determined to avert it before it
happens.
The
aforementioned jilted ex is Claude Langton, a young artist played by PC. Claude has remained on good terms with John,
despite his enduring love for John's fiancée, but Poirot isn't so eager to
accept things at face value. As one
who's made a career out of investigating murders, he knows that hatred can wear
the mask of civility.
On the
whole, it's a pretty good performance. The central mystery and its characters are
well-written, so Claude has a few dimensions for PC to work with. There's an affable friendliness to Claude
which makes it easy to buy into John's insistence that he wouldn't hurt a fly,
but it's played with just enough ambiguity that you can think it might
be an act.
It's
always interesting to me when short pieces of literature are adapted into
longer film/TV works, and “Wasps' Nest is a good example: from 12-page short story to hour-long TV episode. There's a little padding – subplots woven in
about a few of Poirot's associates, who don't even appear in the original story
– but the longer format allows for plenty of expansion on the mystery. Most of the actual goings-on in the story are
actually recapped in conversations between Poirot and John, while the episode shows
these various events happening and adds in a few of its own. Lucky for me; if it hadn't, PC would've only
been in one scene and maybe a narrated flashback or two!
Accent
Watch
A
pretty great-sounding RP – I was impressed.
Recommend?
In
General
– If you like detective stories and don't mind early-90s British TV, I'd say
yes. A well-acted, good mystery.
PC-wise – Maybe. It's a nice role with a bit of range to it.
Warnings
The
threat of murder, obviously, though I can't tell you whether it's actually
committed without spoiling the ending.
Either way, early-90s Masterpiece stuff – it's not going to be gruesome. Also a spot of bother for the coulrophobic.
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