A recent Agatha Christie BBC adaptation has left some people upset after it featured brief scenes of flashbacks from the main character’s Nigerian past. The show’s director called the addition “allegorical” and that Britain’s history of colonialism and empire would be touched upon.
Despite some criticism, Christie’s grandson has given the latest guise of Murder is Easy his blessing, saying the episode is an “adaptation, not a translation,” and that “you are always looking at the story from where you are now”. He added it had been 90 years since it was written.
The new episode, which aired last night (27 December), has a story originally adapted from West African Yoruba culture which informs certain sequences of the show. Director Meenu Gaur said the addition aims to highlight the fact that empire and colonialism is about “becoming part of another culture”, and that “part of us becomes invisible” as a result, reports GB News.
David Jonsson, who stars as main character Luke Fitzwilliam, appears in the opening scene being chased while holding an Ikenga, a sign of power among the Nigerian ethnic group of the Igbo people. The scene recurs throughout the first episode – and screenplay writer Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre admitted it was “kind of an in joke”.
She said: “I wanted to start the show in the way that shows about black people have always begun: with a black man running through a forest apparently being chased by something, in a white shirt, and then I wanted to blow it up.”
Jonsson admitted he was wary about being the first black lead of an Agatha Christie adaptation, saying “at first it really shocked me to the point I didn’t want to do it.”
Christie’s great grandson, James Prichard, is all for it though, saying it all depends on the medium. He said: “One of the things I hold to is that the first few adaptations of her plays were done by other people, and she didn’t like them because she didn’t think they were radical enough for the change in medium.
“She recognised that, when you shift the medium, you need to shift the story. It does give us a degree of licence to change things, but I also believe these are adaptations, not translations, and you are always looking at the story from where you are now, 90 years after this was first written.
“But the story remains central, as does something essentially Christie. I think we know what it is, and whether it’s there or not. And it’s definitely there in Murder Is Easy.”
Director Gaur said she was inspired by the experiences of her grandfather and father, who came to Britain in the 1930s and 1960s respectively, and that it is “one very obvious change [from the book]”.
She admitted that “obviously Luke Fitzwilliam is a white man – he’s a returning colonial police officer from a fictional place and throughout the book, Christie describes him as being brown.”
She added: “Now, I’m a brown person, a brown woman, and…I just started thinking about him as a black person pretty much from the get-go and we decided to put it in the 1950s.”
