Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Kevin McNally, Keeley Hawes, Dorothy Atkinson, Emer Heatley, Simon Greenall, Orla Bird, Aoife Checkland, Archie Barnes, Paul Westwood, Celia Robertson, Alex Caan, Robin Laing, Timothy Walker, Will Adamsdale, Albert Welling, Catherine Skinner, Emma Davies, Jessica Murrain, Rupert Wickham, Sam Lockwood, Samantha Yetunde, Alan Sylvester, Dainton Anderson, Brian Caspe, Ieva Andrejevaite, Igor Grabuzov, Richard Dillane, Carl Batchelor, Devon Black, Elyot Burnett, Celeste Wong, Timothy Knightley, Adrian Metcalfe, Jeremy Secomb, Jonathan Rhodes, Mike Sengelow, Crispin Letts.
It is possible to sit on the fence about a piece of art, not for lacking courage in a form of opinion, but for being able to see both sides of what is a distressing, destabilising, and ultimately, an affair of folly that shows the very human frailty of greed, obsession, and fruitless pursuit of furthering one’s position in life by means of fraud.
On one hand the three-part television series, Stonehouse, is one that is compulsive viewing, its lead character, the British politician and M.P. for Walsall North, (and previously Wednesbury) and his dramatic fall from grace serves as a warning to those who see power as a steppingstone to other fortunes, whose eye can be turned away from a truth of public service. The other side of the coin is the damage incurred on two families to whom his presence was loved, and to whom his deceit was one exposed on a national level.
It is a dichotomy of production, the truth sometimes buried by speculation and rumour, a charismatic man to whom might have worked his way to a grand office of state, a man to whom he was willing to destroy in the name of having his cake and eating it, of whom lies and falsehoods span out of control, until all he was left with was the possibility of imprisonment and the undertow of having been a cog in the wheel of bringing the honourable Harold Wilson to the understanding that his premiership was over.
Speculation in the form of fiction and reality, and in way it is suited to the narrative of John Stonehouse’s life, whether or not he was plagued by his own demons and genuinely saw no other way out but to fake his own death, but it has to be said in purely television terms that the compulsive viewing that beguiles the unknowing viewer, is one of greatness, and none more so than in the performance by Matthew Macfadyen in the titular role, the sublime Kevin McNally as Harold Wilson, and Keeley Hawes as Barbara, the long suffering wife of the man to whom the Houses of Parliament mourned, and then reviled as he was bought back from the dead as his hubris got the better of him.
The intricate touches of history are to be admired, the reveal that he was thought to be the alleged murderer Lord Lucan by Australian police, the near hysterical way in which he surrendered control in the House, and the quiet, almost unassuming way he left the world in the dressing room of a television studio, are ones in which a life is presented, and for that alone the series deserves excellent cheer…but for the tragedy of his own downfall, he would have made a superb and memorable man.
Drama and fiction, truth and theatre, this was John Stonehouse as told by television, it depends on whether you can see both sides of the story so that the truth of fragility can be truly recognised.
Ian D. Hall