The central question in The Little Drummer Girl has surely been, how far will she go?
The drummer girl in question, of course, being Charmiane Ross, otherwise known as Charlie, delivered in a knock-out performance for the past six weeks by the remarkable Florence Pugh.
Every time we think Charlie is caught like a fly in someone else’s spiderweb, she manages to astonish both us, as viewers, and her Israeli and Palestinian handlers.
On reflection, there was no good time for the BBC to have screened this potent representation of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even though Drummer Girl is nominally set in 1979 (and written in 1983), the sad and desperate truth is that there is always bound to be some sort of action between the two sides to act as a mirror to today. Who knows how many Charlies are currently behind the scenes?
In this last episode, Charlie is put to the test and asked to place a bomb — shades of recent episodes of Bodyguard — in a briefcase belonging to an Israeli lecturer from the peace camp, speaking at a London venue.
Inevitably this means the reappearance of Charles Dance as the British intelligence leader, Commander Picton, brandishing an umbrella and antisemitism in almost equal parts. He tells Israeli Marty Kurtz (Michael Shannon) how much he dislikes “your kind” and when Marty picks him up on it, responds: “No-one lies with a smile on their face like you lot”. It is all Marty — and we — can do not to hit him.
By this time Marty knows that Khalil, the Palestinian master-bomber, is in London pulling Charlie’s strings. Marty has a long game planned for Khalil who, he says later, “is not going to be a terrorist for ever”. And one is inexorably reminded of Begin and Shamir, Israeli leaders despised by Britain as terrorists until obliged to deal with them as politicians. Speaking to Picton, Marty says bitterly: “Britain always has the solution to other countries’ problems”, and I think that probably remains the case.
Park Chan-wook, the series director, appears to have combed the world for brutalist architecture in which to frame his protagonists. Charlie and her lover/handler, Gadi Becker (Alexander Skarsgard), spend forever running up and down horrible concrete stairwells or, when in the countryside, through hideous forests full of trees that have given up on the growing thing.
Gadi, of course, has no means of measuring just how close Charlie has got to Khalil — even though he asks her to do just that. In this nail-biting finale, Gadi both pushes Charlie to be intimate with Khalil — but can’t stand it if she is going to take him at his word.
Khalil (Charif Ghattas), whose dialogue, I regret to say, appears to have come straight out of Kahlil Gibran’s awful The Prophet, spends much time gazing into the middle distance and uttering gnomic phrases. But both he and Gadi have one thing in common: just before each asks Charlie to do something life-changing, they say “You don’t have to do this, Charlie”, which basically means that of course she goes ahead and does it.
Well, you don’t need me to tell you that it all ends in tears, more or less. And the Israeli crew begin to enact a bloody vengeance which may well be Le Carre’s way of illustrating the payback for the Munich Olympic massacre of 1972.
I leave the — almost — last word to Gadi, who tells Charlie “one question at a time”, their mantra when he was training her for the acting role of a lifetime. On the contrary, Gadi. I have dozens of questions, and not enough answers.
