This inventive take on a vintage crime tale replaces an English police officer with a Nigerian attaché. It tackles race, feminism and class, while still being quintessentially English
I wonder if the best call an actor can get from their agent is the offer of a part in an Agatha Christie adaptation. The opening credits for Murder Is Easy offer a tantalising roll call of big TV names, including Penelope Wilton, Mark Bonnar, Mathew Baynton and Jon Pointing, but the thing about a murder mystery in which the murderer has a rather long hitlist is that most of them appear for only a scene or two. It seems as if it could be one of the easiest gigs in town.
The busiest of the lot, though, is Industry’s David Jonsson, who stars as Luke Fitzwilliam, refashioned from the retired English police officer of the original novel into a Nigerian attache, who has travelled to the UK to take up a position at Whitehall. The action, of which there is plenty, has been moved forward a couple of decades, to 1953, and there are reworkings of certain characters and plot points. Screenwriter Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre’s tweaking of the story suggests an inventive and imaginative new take on the 1939 original. The first half takes the most liberties with its source material and is by far the strongest, hinting at Fitzwilliam’s divided loyalties as a member of the ruling elite and a colonised subject of a nation close to independence. His conversations with his Nigerian friends in London, about pride, duty and obligation, make the prospect of him being dropped into a mostly white country village in the mid-20th century even more tantalising a dramatic prospect.
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