The Times review

"Darcy in the underworld" by Mary Ann Sieghart

The Times, 16 December 2006

Colin Firth stars in a new drama about social inequality that has fine acting but few answers, says Mary Ann Sieghart

In a city like London, we all lead parallel, and often adjacent, lives. At the very top — the overclass, if you like — there are the investment bankers and hedge fund managers who don’t go anywhere near the services the rest of us depend on. They don’t use the Tube or — heaven forbid — the buses. They send their children to private schools and use private healthcare. The only privations they have to share with the rest of humanity are the traffic jams down the M4 on a Friday evening, as they head for their country homes; unless they have a helicopter, that is. Most of us are located close to the middle, holding down middle-class jobs and living in middling homes — neither the Holland Park mansion nor the grotty council flat. But well below our relatively comfortable lives are people who have not even a grotty council flat to their name: an underclass of folk who are forced by circumstance either to sleep on the street or in hostels for the homeless. It is the collision of these two worlds, the top and the bottom, that forms the premise of Born Equal, a new drama by Dominic Savage, whose gritty TV films — including When I Was Twelve and Out of Control — have all tackled contemporary social issues.

The play will be watched for the cast alone. Colin Firth plays Mark, the hedge-fund manager who, to his credit (and the surprise of his colleague), opts early in the plot to take the Tube rather than a taxi to his plush house in Swiss Cottage. Round the corner from his home is a hostel that houses Robert (Robert Carlyle), newly released from jail, and the heavily pregnant Michelle (Anne-Marie Duff), who has escaped from her abusive partner. In the same hostel is a Nigerian family whose father was forced to flee his country because of death threats. Mark’s social conscience leads him to become embroiled in the lives of the hostel-dwellers, with disastrous consequences.

Would he have done better to walk on by? Maybe. Maybe not. One of the merits of this drama is that the morality is deliberately ambiguous. We feel as sorry for the rich wife whom Mark neglects as we do for the 17-year-old homeless runaway whom he befriends. And we feel sympathy and suspicion in equal measure for the ex-con who shares her hostel.

The acting performances are superbly naturalistic. There was no script; all the cast were expected to improvise and the drama was shot without rehearsals. This gives a freshness and believability to the dialogue, and is particularly effective for Firth, whom we are used to seeing in starchly buttoned-up period roles. Even the children perform well.

And yet . . . there is a heavy-handedness about the plot that makes you want to go, ”Yeah, yeah, yeah.“ We all know that some men beat up their partners, that some asylum-seekers have fled murderous regimes. We all know that very rich people lead privileged lives. And the postwar urban planning in London that deliberately planted council estates in even the smartest of boroughs means that the well-off and the underprivileged can sometimes live in the same street.

The recent murder in West London of the lawyer Tom ap Rhys Price by two knife-wielding thugs brought home this clash of cultures and values. But Savage’s film has no prescription for bridging the gap. Watch it for the stars and the acting, by all means, but don’t expect any deep insights or useful answers.