Last week, in the penultimate episode of this John Le Carré adaptation, Charles Dance popped up, like an actor from a different age, to explain the show’s title.
Dance plays Commander Picton, a world-weary British spymaster, and watching him was like shifting between dramatic time zones. His role, hardly more than a cameo, was a masterclass in stiff-upper lip insouciance. He even made some diplomatic moustache small talk.
Dance, as Picton, would fit happily alongside Alec Guinness’s vintage George Smiley, an imperious performance which seems black and white, but is actually yellow and brown.
So why drummer girl? Well, Picton was telling his Israeli counterpart Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon) about an incident in 1947, when he had taken a Jewish boy in for questioning after a gang of children had been shooting at his men.
Convinced that the boy was a weak link, he interrogated him — “nearly broke my bloody hand” — but the boy gave nothing away.
Picton concludes: “God, if I haven’t made a little drummer boy right here, ready to bang his gong into the next battle they find for him, I don’t know what I’ve done.”
The drummer girl is Charlie Ross (Florence Pugh), a radical actress, kidnapped and tamed (by the charmless but smouldering Gadi, played as a reticent hunk by Alexander Skarsgård), she is now playing the role of a Palestinian fighter, primed to blow up an academic with an explosive briefcase. But what does Charlie really think? She started the series as a thespian with radical sentiments, but as her mission has developed, she has witnessed terrible things, and endured a fighter training camp.
She is also — and here Le Carré’s story may be betraying the sexual prejudices of its time — prone to persuasion by charismatic men. The Palestinian mastermind Khalil (Charif Ghattas) is like a darker version of Gadi, employing his emotional distance like a weapon (or possibly a shield). Charlie, meanwhile, is primed to be a sex bomb; albeit one who goes on top.
Observant viewers will have noted similarities with the set-up of Jed Mercurio’s Bodyguard; the briefcase, the conflicted loyalties caused by sexual attraction. To these, we can add concrete ziggurats and convoluted plots held in shape by knots of tension.
In terms of Le Carré adaptations, The Little Drummer Girl is closer to the traditional model — diplomacy rendered as Slow TV — than The Night Manager, a late-period story which was more concerned with the grotesqueries of the superwealthy than spycraft. It’s not that the theme of Drummer Girl has dated. There is no shortage of recent parallels to feed the the idea of terror inflamed by aggressive interrogation. But, there’s a nihilism at work too, which feels brutally contemporary.
Picton and Kurtz are going through the motions of cross and double-cross. Gadi and Khalil are on opposite sides, doing the same. Charlie is forever being urged to “play the scene” by the Israelis, while the Palestinian, Khalil, offers critical notes. “Shhh,” he says, as Charlie overdoes her protestations. “You’re trying too hard to hate them.”
Her radio plays The Final Solution by Pere Ubu, a dark joke, and a song which must have received approximately no radio play since its release in 1976.
The Little Drummer Girl concludes Sunday at 9pm on BBC One.
