If you’re in the mood for political intrigue, Netflix has just added a dark tale of espionage, terrorism and betrayal set in Victorian London.
Based on Joseph Conrad’s terrorism satire novel, The Secret Agent originally aired on the BBC back in 2016.
Film critic Roger Ebert once labelled Conrad’s novel of the same name ‘perhaps the least filmable novel he ever wrote’ – alongside a one-star review of the 1996 film adaptation. However this four-part adaptation adds plenty of plot goings-ons to the novel’s character study to make it pop on the 1886-set screen.
The drama centres around Verloc, the owner of a smutty Soho sex shop, who has a side hustle on the go as an informer for the Russian embassy, keeping tabs on a group of anarchists in the capital – whose aims are to ‘attack the rich!’
But when the Russians make new demands on Verloc, involving a bomb plot, his identity is put at risk – all the more so because his wife keeps inviting the anarchists to their home for revolutionary meetings.
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The cast is a real who’s who of British acting talent, with Toby Jones heading up the show as Verloc and Vicky McClure playing his wife Winnie.
To round out the top of the call sheet, Stephen Graham joins them as the police Chief Inspector Heat – naturally, a very cool name for the eternally cool actor.
The show taps into the hotbed of European radicalism at the time, with the central terrorist attack inspired by a real-life plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.
Jones said it’s no mistake we’re drawn to spy stories, telling The Times in 2016: ‘We know we live in a surveillance society, we’re being watched, we’re watching, we’ve always said we don’t fully trust what politicians say, but now we know not to trust them. Conrad had the original spy story.’
Jones went on to say he was ‘gripped’ by the show’s storytelling and the performances of his fellow actors, but then added: ‘I don’t like anything I do. All I see is what I don’t do.’
When the show was first released, the Radio Times hailed it as a ‘gripping period tale exploring urgent modern anxieties’, while The Telegraph described it as ‘one of the bleakest, murkiest and most disturbing dramas this year’.
However, the reviews were a mixed bag, with the Guardian dismayed at what had been lost from the original novel, while The New York Times described the show as a family soap opera that didn’t get at the character’s psychologies.
The Secret Agent is available to stream on Netflix.
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