Geraldine McEwan and Miss Marple
Geraldine McEwan is leaving ITV and the role of Miss Marple for other pursuits after playing Agatha Christie's crime solving denizen of St. Mary Mead for four years. She's one of a number of gifted actresses who've played the character. Others include Margaret Rutherford and Joan Hixson (my own favorite).
I must say that, although Ms. McEwan illuminated the role quite nicely, I did not like the remakes of the Christies on this go-around. Ms McEwan, who is bright and sunny and clever, seems to attract much too much attention to be Ms. Christie's sleuth. I'd cast her as the detective Mrs. Mallory in the Hazel Holt novels. Ultimately, though, what spoiled them for me was the liberty that the scriptwriters took with the novels. They "updated" the plots quite liberally, changing the characters and the stories. I can't see why they thought such things were necessary. Did they think we would not understand stories from the thirties, forties and fifties? For example, in updating The Body in the Library, the writers made the relationship between the two killers a lesbian relationship, and created an entirely new killer. In the original novel, one killer is Mark Gaskell. In the new version, Adelaide Jefferson becomes one of the killers. Why change the plot? Why on earth the writers thought it necessary to do that I do not understand. Ms. Christie's original novel made it perfectly clear, and perfectly understandable that the relationship between Mark Gaskell and Josie Turner was a normal heterosexual relationship, if cold-bloodedly aimed at acquiring an inheritance. Ms. Christie could introduce homosexual relationships, and does, in some of her novels; she was an adult and knew what they were. That's quite enough. Leave her other work alone.
Agatha Christie may not be the greatest novelist in the world, but her mysteries have held up quite nicely over the years. She is not, in my opinion, the sort of writer whose work can be "updated" in the way that Shakespeare's or Jane Austen's can. Her work needs the sense of time and place that she gives it in the original; those are part of its charm. I hope that the writers in charge of the rest of the Agatha Christie run leave well enough alone and translate the novels to the screen without "translating" Ms. Christie's work into plots and characters she did not write. I much prefer the adaptations featuring Joan Hixson; she captures the woolly Miss Marple to perfection.
