Judi Dench gets top billing on screen in this engrossing Michael Frayn play for British TV, but it is Robert Hardy's show in the role of an uptight, buttoned-down corporate exec whose life is all business.
Frayn's subject is the corrosive affect of a society built around "sell, sell, sell", in this case Brits stationed at a Berlin subsidiary of their office design corporation. Ensemble cast fleshes out various types, with a showy role for Steffanie Pitt (offspring of Hammer favorite Ingrid Pitt) as an ebullient German girl manning the company's display booth.
While Hardy is typically brilliant as the fast-talking, one-track mind guy who everyone fears will suffer a heart attack (a script ploy Frayn milks for surprise and pathos), it is the incomparable professionalism of Dench that makes this a must-see. Her role is relatively small, but she pumps life and individuality into the part of a secretary who is submissive to her male colleagues, but not a stock figure but an empathetic, Julie Harris-esque vulnerable woman.
I saw Tom Courtenay in a wonderful (but relatively obscure) Frayn play "Clouds" over 40 years ago in London, and admire his work greatly. This minor effort is another example of a talented playwright, so well-known for "Noises Off" and more recently "Copenhagen".
Frayn's subject is the corrosive affect of a society built around "sell, sell, sell", in this case Brits stationed at a Berlin subsidiary of their office design corporation. Ensemble cast fleshes out various types, with a showy role for Steffanie Pitt (offspring of Hammer favorite Ingrid Pitt) as an ebullient German girl manning the company's display booth.
While Hardy is typically brilliant as the fast-talking, one-track mind guy who everyone fears will suffer a heart attack (a script ploy Frayn milks for surprise and pathos), it is the incomparable professionalism of Dench that makes this a must-see. Her role is relatively small, but she pumps life and individuality into the part of a secretary who is submissive to her male colleagues, but not a stock figure but an empathetic, Julie Harris-esque vulnerable woman.
I saw Tom Courtenay in a wonderful (but relatively obscure) Frayn play "Clouds" over 40 years ago in London, and admire his work greatly. This minor effort is another example of a talented playwright, so well-known for "Noises Off" and more recently "Copenhagen".