Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, Clive Russell, David Wilmot, Damien Molony, James Wilby, Leanne Best, Stanley Townsend, Charley Murphy, Martin McCann, Michael Marcus, Guy Williams, Steve Gunn, Frank Melia.
Dynamite and a Woman arguably the two most explosive elements in Victorian London, one in which caused devastation, the other which broke hearts and in which both figured predominantly in the latest case to fall to Detective Inspector Reid to solve; both being surrounded by the new instrument in London, electricity.
Whereas the previous episode had gone into great depth to look at the lives of women and their respective struggles to be on an equal footing with their male counterparts, Dynamite and a Woman looked at the other social and political struggle that was bought to the East-End streets of Whitechapel at that time. This was the Irish Republican Brotherhood and their case for a free Ireland, in some respects peaceful and in others, especially in the guise of Aiden Galven, a man more driven by the thought of a more destructive weapon of war and the havoc it could bring.
For many this issue is just as sensitive now as it was in the latter days of the 19th Century and the writing and acting captured both the heightened emotions that were building up on both sides of the political divide. However by turning the process into one driven by the greed of an Englishman, Charles Broadwick and his resolve to see his patented electricity system win through at all costs against his great rival Sebastian Ferranti, the story took a more alternative route in the line of enquiry.
For the second successive story the focus was more on those around the three top billed players with only the softening touch of the excellent Leanne Best as Jane Cobden once more providing inspiration to Matthew Macfadyen’s Inspector Reid being any sort of reference to the continuing overall plot.
Instead it fell to the new Detective Constable Albert Flight in which this episode hung and drew upon. Taking a beating from his own Detective Sargent, the indefatigable Jerome Flynn, in which to melt more sympathetically into the Irish quarter of Whitechapel and it seems into the arms of local tavern owner Evelyn Foley, played with great charm and conviction by Charlie Murphy, the woman at the centre of two men’s fatherly dreams. These two young actors carried the episode well and in such constraints as the struggle between two ideals not wanting to give an inch to the other.
For many the episode may have triggered a confusing set of emotions, those who know their history would know that Jack the Ripper was not the only evil stalking the streets of the crowded East-End but it was the inability of some people willing to listen to another’s point of view that could have bought terror to London at that time.
Ian D. Hall