Television - Andrew Billen welcomes a play for today
What a pleasure it is to watch - never mind what a pleasure it is to review - a one-off British drama that recalls the days when television made plays. Split Second (BBC1, Thursday) was not, of course, a play - it was a film - but it was an honest piece of contemporary drama that, although featuring lawyers and policemen, by no means belonged to the bloated genre of crime. If it had a provenance, it was that of the yuppie nightmare movies of the 1980s such as Martin Scorsese's After Hours, John Landis's Into the Night or Stephen Poliakoff's Caught on a Train. Compared with an average Play for Today, its social commentary was oblique. But it was there all right.
Split Second 's split second was the moment Michael Anderson, a corporate lawyer, knocked Billy, an aggressive cyclist, off his bike. Michael was driving home to an affluent suburb of Edinburgh after a taxing day in the office, late for a dinner party, a half-remembered shopping list on his mind, and a near-impossible deadline to meet at work. The next morning, the newspapers and the radio talk of road rage, but we know that Michael and Billy are the victims of something unnameably worse: lifestyle rage, perhaps.
The writer, James Mavor, asks us to observe that the competitiveness that cost Billy his life on the road was merely an example of capitalist society's general neurotic rivalry. In his office, Michael finds the Armani jacket of a younger colleague draped on the back of his chair. Lesley Robinson, a human resources assessor locally famous for her "mind games", interviews him, worrying away at his marriage. Michael's right leg bounces ominously. The men go outside the office to smoke, with their security tags hanging round their necks like nooses.
At home, Michael's wife Angie is repenting giving up her job as an interior designer to raise children. When he mentions the prospect of promotion to a post in China, she demands recommitment to her present: "This is it. You, me, Harry and Alisa. And if you don't like it, do something about it because it is not up to me any more." Michael's best friend Ronnie, a lawyer who has ostensibly taken the high road of criminal law and legal aid cases, is also in some kind of psychological race with him. He scoffs at Michael's "wanky commercial" cases and picks rows with his wife.
Mavor's spare script deprived us of big speeches but left a lot of subtext to be inferred beneath the short ones. The nightmare dinner party on the night of the death, for instance, told you all you needed to know about the strain on these relationships. My only quarrel was with Mavor's decision to place Michael and Ronnie up on the roof of his home for a heart-to-heart at the end of it: for the intended effect, namely that their friendship endured beyond their differences and on a plane above the relationships with their wives, had already been achieved.
Clive Owen, who has always seemed to me a curiously blank and weak-voiced actor, excelled as Michael, accelerating from exhaustion to rage in seconds. Helen McCrory gave an unselfish performance as his wife, hinting at the ways in which her own competitive edges had gone septic. Tony Curran played Ronnie as a sly agent provocateur of domestic strife. As Kathy, the dead cyclist's wife, Dawne Steel was also excellent, catching the immobilising confusion of grief by putting on, taking off and putting on her jacket as the police broke the news.
In the end, Michael gives himself up to the law, unaware it is about to collar him anyway. He escapes with a light sentence that provokes a burst of bitter, class-fuelled hatred from Kathy, even though the mad split second has cost Michael his marriage and his job. Yet perhaps she is rightly outraged. By the end, one feels, he has been purged not only of his crime but of a life to which he was ill-suited. In the final moments, his children, who have earlier been terrified of him, seem pleased to see him. So even does Kathy.
The film made cautious use of its Edinburgh backdrop. Arthur's Seat loomed through a plate-glass window that could belong to a modern office anywhere. But what we did see of the old city fitted the dour Presbyterianism of the script. As I watched Michael showering and scraping off the blood from his car as frantically as Lady Macbeth washing her hands, I realised that this was a film crisp with Calvinist guilt. It even identified a new Scottish dilemma - that Calvinism's work ethic has brought modern Scotland a level of income it has been taught from the pulpit to despise. Edinburgh, as I have discovered visiting the festival this month, is a city in which it is now easier to buy ciabatta than scone. The front window display of Jenners has four overcoated mannequins pissing into a urinal. This decadence, Mavor is saying, will be paid for dearly.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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