Single drama Capturing Mary was Stephen Poliakoff’s companion piece to Joe’s Palace (both went out on the same evening but on different channels, Palace on BBC1, Mary on BBC2) and featuring Joe Dix as the central figure as the caretaker of a strange house.
Capturing Mary opens as Maggie Smith who plays the older Mary, knocks unannounced on the door of a grand old house in central London. Coaxed across the threshold by its teenage concierge, Joe (Danny Lee Wynter), she enters and hesitantly relives her past.
When Mary retraces her footsteps through the corridors of the splendid mansion, where as a brilliant young writer and critic (played in her earlier incarnation by Ruth Wilson) she attended glamorous Fifties soirees, she recounts to the sympathetic Joe the story of her youth.
Looking back on her heyday, the once highly successful Mary recollects the salons at the elegant house when she used to rub shoulders with the cultural elite. She reveals to Joe that she is haunted by the memory of a deeply sinister man called Greville (David Walliams), whom she met at one of these gatherings.
A social climber who rose without trace, Greville had tentacles that seemed to reach into the highest echelons of society. Mary remembers him as an ostensibly supremely charming, but in fact subtly evil, man.
He feigned friendship with Mary but, when she spurned him, he ruthlessly brought about her destruction. Capturing Mary is a dark and frightening account of the past and how it can capture and destroy a person’s life.
cast
MAGGIE SMITH as Mary Gilbert / RUTH WILSON as Young Mary Gilbert / DAVID WALLIAMS as Greville White / DANNY LEE WYNTER as Joe Dix / GEMMA ARTERTON as Liza / MICHAEL BYERS as Zach / MAX DOWLER as Mr Graham / JACK BERKELEY as Musican / REBECCA BOTTONE, CLAIRE TURNER AND CELENA BRIDGE as Singers
Writer/Director: Stephen Poliakoff / Producer: Deborah Jones / Music: Adrian Johnston / Director of Photography: Danny Cohen / Film Editors: Clare Douglas, Tom Kinnersly / Production Designer: Mark Leese / Costume Design: Annie Symons
UK / BBC Two / 1×120 minute episode / October 2007
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