The Witness for the Prosecution
Critique • Quotes • At the movies
Leonard Vole (Billy Howle) protests testimony against him in 2016's The Witness for the Prosecution.
Going back to modernize a murderous classic
The Witness for the Prosecution (2016): Television serial, two parts, 120 minutes; director Julian Jarrold; writer Sarah Phelps; featuring Toby Jones, Andrea Riseborough, Billy Howle, Kim Cattrall, David Haig, Tim McMullan
Several decades after successful films were based on Agatha's Christie's play, Witness for the Prosecution, a British television production went back to Christie's original short story for its inspiration.
Toby Jones stars as lawyer John Mayhew.
The Witness for the Prosecution (yes, the leading article is back in the title) restores the bare-bones plot, ignoring all the changes wrought by previous adaptations. Solicitor John Mayhew is back in the spotlight as the main player in the defence of accused murderer Leonard Vole. Barrister Sir Charles Carter is relegated to a functional role. Vole's wife, the "witness" at the centre of the case, sports the name of Romaine again. The period is changed back to the time after the First World War.
Most significantly, the extra plot twists added by the play and movies have been removed, leaving the guilty parties to get away with their crimes in the end, as in the original story.
Not to say this 2016 serial is completely faithful to that 1925 story. Far from it.
Writer Sarah Phelps (who had great success with And Then There Were None the previous year) creates backstories never imagined by Christie for all the main characters.
The story's mention of Mayhew's "dry as dust" cough is built into a disease of coughing up blood. As if that's not enough tragedy for one life, his legal career is stalled, his wife is repelled by him, and we find out his son had been killed in the war. Toby Jones depressingly depicts Mayhew suffering through most of it stoically, until the final shocks drive him to...well, you'll have to live through it with him to understand what he does.
Andrea Riseborough's Romaine is a music hall performer picked on by the rest of the company, a pensive figure described by some as "magnetic and opaque" but kind of placid compared to Romaines or Christines we've seen before. Her singing enchants Mayhew to tears. And she does convincingly turn wicked as required—without the theatrics of earlier movies.
Similar points could be made about Billy Howle's Leonard Vole. He seems shallow and self-pitying as the unjustly charged man until we see his real character emerge.
Trailer for television's The Witness for the Prosecution of 2016.
Kim Cattrall's role as the murder victim seems fleshed out to justify making her one of the show's four top stars. She's fine, but she's overshadowed by Monica Dolan as Janet, her loyal maid who unexpectedly becomes a second victim—of another kind.
Overall the tone of this Witness is dark and sombre, its drama often appearing slightly off focus, its performances internalized. Very different from the Hollywood-style suspense and histrionics of previous adaptations. But engrossing in its own way.
It's an irony of sorts that the adaptation that goes back to the earliest source and sets the story in its original period after the Great War is also the one that adopts a nihilistic sensibility that modern audiences can relate to.
— Eric
