The footage was absorbing, not just of the films themselves but of the masters of the various arts behind them. This was stuffed to the gills with archive footage of more than a century's worth of the novels' translations to screen and examined whether there is, as director Sergei Eisenstein once contended, an essentially filmic quality to the man's work that makes him such a lure to writers, directors and actors. It's so, so good.Īs if that were not enough fun for one evening, Arena followed it up with a wonderful documentary, Dickens on Film (BBC4), written by Michael Eaton.

Rhys made you feel every throb of his suffering, from the beaten-down ambition in his breast to his bloody great boner for Rosa.Īll the pieces are now in play, murder has been done and the rest unfolds tomorrow night. Rory Kinnear as the Reverend Crisparkle did nothing but make goodness interesting, which of course is everything.īut the dark, brooding heart of the story was Matthew Rhys as John Jasper – choirmaster of Cloisterham's cathedral, uncle of Edwin and leader of a life as regular as the rhythm of his metronome, save for the visits to the opium den and the helplessly lust-filled, hopelessly frustrated passion for his nephew's fiancee. Sacha Dhawan and Amber Rose Revah, playing twins Neville and Helena Landless, shone as the clear-eyed strangers seeing everything except Neville's coming nightmare. Tamzin Merchant as his luminously beautiful but otherwise entirely unfortunate betrothed, Rosa Bud, was just as good – young and spirited but vulnerable still, so you felt the less melodramatic dangers she faced, hemmed in by unsuitable suitors on all sides, almost more acutely than Drood's. Freddie Fox played the insufferable gilded youth Edwin Drood to such perfection that the eponymous mystery first promised to be why no one had offed the little shit long before now.

Dickens the mystery of edwin drood