Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Emily Watson, Denise Gough, Thalissa Teixeira, Karl Johnson, Jamie Sives, Risteard Cooper, Eileen Davies, Chizzy Akudolu, Thea Barrett, Nina Wadia, Henry Helm, Isabelle Mullally, Ariyon Bakare, Madeleine Demetriou, Jackie Clune, Adrian Hood, Islah Abdur-Rahman, Grace Calder, Paul Chahidi, Stephen McCole, Rina Fatania, Delainey Hayles, Nathalie Armin, Joan Iyiola, Barbara Drennan, Ria Knowles, Gina Fillingham, Alex Hughes, James Doherty.
Society is far too quick to categorise someone who may have fallen into certain habits as being a person to write off, to demonise as being as being unfit, or more tellingly as a human being beyond redemption. We do so because it suits the narrative of superiority, we use to look down upon others misguided actions or simple mistakes with a feeling of control, with dominance, it flatters our ego that we can forever have a hold of another soul and use every criticism possible to keep the feeling of power.
Superiority, it is an ugly word and even uglier reaction to the downfall of anybody who may have hit upon hard times, or even have found solace in the arms of a physically or mentally destructive pastime, and yet as Clara Salaman shows neatly in her own adaption of her own book Too Close, written under the pseudonym of Natalie Daniels, it is a complex emotion that we all have the capacity to inflict upon those we deem to deserve our disrespect.
The three-part television dramatisation of Too Close has sympathy for the plight of those whose life has fallen off track, for those whose actions have caused pain in themselves and for those around them, and whilst Denise Gough’s portrayal of Connie Mortensen is one expertly graced in utter belief of how a woman worn down by expectation, false love and betrayal, there is still a haunting of deniability to the claims of her psychiatrist Dr. Emma Robertson, played by Emily Watson, that the spiralling out of control and the accident that has plagued her patient was down to a series of events that bring the two women’s lives into a sense of parallel being.
Too Close has virtue and honesty within its three-part run, it has the intrigue and the conviction of the story, the issue resides in the sheer form that the tale takes with its main characters, in what could have been an account of great deception and the use of more elemental persuasion, became a narrative of poignancy. That is perhaps the point, it is the subtle twist of expectancy that gives the piece its sense of absolution, that complexity of unyielding the superior attitude in favour of compassion, and for that alone, the drama unfolds and brings the viewer in line with the artist’s thinking.
A respectable drama, Too Close succeeds in pointing the narrative of blame away from the neglected and abused, and onto society at large in a performance of consequences and belief.
Ian D. Hall