In the second episode of the BBC’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, a bride walks into the hall of a large country house and finds her husband standing on the elegant curved staircase, with his head buried beneath the silk evening gown his ex-wife is wearing.
This, it is clear, is not a stereotypically cozy Christie retelling.
Instead, this three-part limited series, “Towards Zero” — which comes to BritBox on Wednesday — takes the forbidden desire, well-heeled nihilism and murderous emotion from Christie’s 1944 novel of the same name and gives those a distinctly contemporary feel.
“It’s incredibly dark, interesting material,” said Sam Yates, the show’s director. Since Christie’s novels have already been adapted so many times, “the choice is do them exactly by the book every time, or let them live for the moment,” said Yates, who also directed “Vanya,” the inventive one-man Chekhov adaptation currently playing Off Broadway and starring Andrew Scott.
For “Towards Zero,” Yates and the writer Rachel Bennette chose the moment, tweaking their source material for today’s audience, as shown by the steamy interaction on the staircase, which pushes the characters to violent extremes.
Set in 1936 among the British upper class, “Towards Zero” opens with a love triangle playing out around a much-publicized divorce. Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a playboy tennis star, is ending his marriage to Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland), on whom he cheated with the younger and more assertive Kay (Mimi Keene), who would become his wife.
But Nevile and Audrey just can’t quit each other, and he convinces Kay that they should spend their honeymoon with Audrey at a picturesque coastal home where both divorcés had spent time as children.
This uneasy trio, as well as other summer visitors nursing their own resentments, are hosted by the formidable Lady Tressilian (Anjelica Huston), who is confined to her bedroom, traumatized after witnessing a family death. To play the acid-tongued matriarch, Huston said recently by phone, that she was inspired by the powerful women overseeing large households whom she had known during her own childhood in England and Ireland.
Lady Tressilian is also revising her will, and by the time the first body is discovered, toward the end of Episode 2, we know that most of the characters have a reason to want at least a couple of their fellow house guests dead. It’s unusually late for a Christie murder, more than halfway through the narrative, but the TV adaptation also reflects the pacing of the novel.
James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and an executive producer on the show, said that, once she was an established author, Christie enjoyed writing out-of-series novels, such as “Towards Zero,” that didn’t feature her most famous detectives. “Poirot and Marple give her work a particular feel, and removing them removes a certain feeling of security in the reader, and allows a freedom of form that I think she found inspiring,” Prichard said in an email.
Yates, the director, said that while Christie was writing “Towards Zero” in the early 1940s, the author became interested in Freud and his ideas about psychoanalysis, and applied those theories to her characters.
The title refers to the notion that “every murder has its moment of origin, its point zero,” as the lawyer Frederick Treves (Clarke Peters) says on the show. Delaying the murder gave the author more time to explore what brought her characters to that crunch.
Matthew Rhys, who plays the show’s police detective, said he was drawn to the role’s “depth and layering,” as well as the story’s psychological richness — which felt different from the Christie he’d read before.
In another change from the book, Rhys’s Inspector Leach is a conflation of two police characters from the novel — Leach and his uncle, Superintendent Battle — since TV audiences are more familiar with a single onscreen detective, Yates said.
Unlike Christie’s stalwart sleuth Miss Marple, Leach is an outsider. When he arrives at Lady Tressilian’s home, he is at the “absolute lowest ebb possible,” Rhys said: His experience as a soldier in World War I left him “disappointed in humanity,” Rhys said, and his life feels meaningless. He smokes battered cigarettes, and tells a barman to leave him the bottle of whiskey; when Lady Tressilian tells him, “The devil’s got your soul,” it doesn’t seem hyperbolic.
He finds much to confirm his misanthropy among the house guests, who have little regard for one another. The one person Leach connects with emotionally is Sylvia (Grace Doherty), a girl who is equally disenchanted with the world — another change from the novel to suit modern tastes.
If “Towards Zero,” with its beautiful period costumes and upper-class rituals, feels quintessentially British, so did the shoot, which took place last summer.
For Huston, who described herself as an Anglophile — thanks to a childhood spent in exclusive English schools and on her parents’ Irish estate — the whole thing felt “very relaxed.” The cast and crew had “nice lunches on the grass,” she said, and she drank a lot of tea: “It was like coming home, in a way.”
