“Baftas 2016 – meet television's brightest stars | Television & radio

“Baftas 2016 – meet television's brightest stars | Television & radio - The Guardian” plus 1 more

Baftas 2016 – meet television's brightest stars | Television & radio - The Guardian

Posted: 08 May 2016 12:00 AM PDT

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Baftas 2016 – meet television's brightest stars | Television & radio The Guardian

The Mirror Crack’d, Salisbury Playhouse, review: another staged Agatha Christie left for dead by TV - Telegraph.co.uk

Posted: 26 Feb 2019 12:00 AM PST

The effect, albeit nominally fitting in its mood of psychological fracture, is counter-productively giddy-making – you almost feel like calling for smelling salts. Partly, the issue is inherent in this story – Miss Marple, hobbled by a fall, must sift the evidence at one sedentary remove – scrambling the sequence of events. TV can do close-up, misdirect through almost subliminal associations – here, when everything is on view, the broad theatricality smacks of overkill.

The most memorable scenelets are the stillest, quietest, least assuming – as when Susie Blake's Miss Marple, as sweet-mannered and shrewd as you'd wish, shares confidences with her garrulous friend Dolly (Julia Hills); Miss M talks of her long-dead sweetheart, court-martialled in the First World War, the latter wishes she hadn't been so stern with her children, now grown-up.

Reflections on motherhood, loneliness and loss will strike a chord with many and, as with The Mousetrap and another current fusty whodunnit hit in London (Witness for the Prosecution), there's a profound awareness of our need to role-play. Another draft might do the trick but, insofar as the evening illustrates that the business of rebooting the queen of crime for theatre today is a work-in-progress, it serves a valuable purpose of a sort.