JCC [Tarzan meets Lady McBeth] le Carré's "The Little Drummer Girl" TV adaptation

The cast so far:

Florence (Lady McBeth) Pugh as Chrlie

Alexander (Tarzan) Skarrsgård as Martin Kutz

It's the same production company that produced previous le Carré adaptations The Night Manager, which was good, and A Most Wanted Man and Our Kind of Traitor, which I thought were less good. I hoping this will be more in the vein of TNM as they are both TV adaptations and don't have to hack away at le Carré's narrative to squeeze it into a cinema run-time.

The director is Park Chan-wook, who directed Oldboy. He's got a strong visual style so this should look great if nothing else.

The plot:

Articles:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/corporate2/mediacentre/latestnews/2017/the-little-drummer-girl

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/big-little-lies-alexander-skarsgard-little-drummer-girl-1202620461/

Ender Sai, any thoughts? I'm not at all familiar with the book.

 

The book is quite good, and there are some memoir-style anecdotes in his 2016 collection The Pigeon Tunnel which talk more about his time in Palestine and meeting Yassir Arafat.

I'm unsure how it will play today though. The Night Manager was written in... I think 1994 or so, and therefore had a set of politics applied which were easily updated to the modern era because it was no longer left v right, East v West.

In LDG, Charlie is recruited by Kurtz to find Khalil, a Palestinian bomber. She is to stage an elaborate honey trap so Kurtz can kill him (and her if necessary ,so the Mossad has plausible deniability). Given Charlie is already a left wing radical, she unsurprisingly begins to sympathise with the Palestinian cause as she trains to become a suicide bomber.

Unless the show is damning of the stupidity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I think it will fall flat. Audiences are removed from the Cold War and nastiness of the USSR; being a lefty won't necessary make Charlie a naive outsider. And criticism of Israel's handling over the Palestinians could be too tempting to just make them the villains when it's pretty clear that both sides are problematic.

It's a great book, don't get me wrong, and the Diane Keaton film was utterly ****. But it was of its time, and I'm not sure if it'll work like Night Manager did. I think there are two Le Carre books which would make excellent mini-series and would strike me as more urgent than this one - Single & Single, and The Mission Song.

I quite liked A Most Wanted Man, but Our Kind of Traitor was a bit flat. Though nothing was quite as terrible as the 2011 film adaptation of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.

 

Wow, I can spell "Macbeth". Twice.

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It sounds like they're making it period, so at least no awkward updating. With a writer like le Carré the closer to the original text the better. Still, you might be right about it not working for today's audience, but honestly, as long as the leads are hot I imagine the majority of viewers in this country won't care one way or another about the politics.

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I've really read very little le Carré - just The Honourable Schoolboy and The Secret Pilgrim I think. I'm a bit sad The Honourable Schoolboy didn't get made in the early 80's between Tinker, Tailor and Smiley's People - would have been nice to have the whole trilogy. The way that this The Ink Factory production company is going though, I'm sure they'll get around to adapting the two novels you mentioned, as they seem determined to make as many le Carré adaptations as possible - I can only assume they've bought the rights to his entire back catalogue.

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I assume that's a typo and you mean the 2011 version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? The one that paled so, so badly against the superior BBC miniseries?

 

lol yes it was.

 

It was such a terrible adaptation though. The decisions to make it "modern", i.e. in having Guillam be gay, were bafflingly insipid and slavishly trendy.

 

I think it is great that they are expanding this to promote feminism while also celebrating Christmas. I can't wait for this to come out.

 

What did you think of the book?

 

Okay, we've got a trailer:

Looks good to me. Having seen both Lady Macbeth and The Handmaiden recently I'm even more enthusiastic for this. Directed by Park Chan-Wook, starring Alexander Skarsgård, Michael Shannon and Florence Pugh... this has to be good, right?