Ed McLachlan
start. Can this story really be true? I kept checking the facts and, yes, this actually happened and could be happening again in a street near you. Having run up £700,000 of debt, John Darwin, a Teesside prison officer (played by the superbly creepy Eddie Marsan), chooses to fake his own death rather than file for bankruptcy. Leaving his empty canoe bobbing about on the North Atlantic, he sneaks home and hides for five years in the bedsit next door, which can be accessed from his wife’s wardrobe. Life for John isn’t as hard as it might sound because he still has his internet porn and his conjugal rights at bedtime. Oh, and his wife, Anne (Monica Dolan, who also played Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult), cooks all his meals, while keeping their two mourning sons at bay. Plus he goes for walks along the beach, hiding behind a beard and a bobble hat. Following his instructions to the letter, Anne gets the insurance money, sells the house – a mausoleum straight out of Psycho – and joins her husband in Panama, where he’s spent another
£400,000 on land, before discovering he can’t be a resident because he is officially dead. In which case, he may as well give himself up to the police. The mood board is composed of browns, greys and sludge – and that’s just Anne Darwin. Chris Lang, who wrote the script, has taken a punt on Anne: in his hands, this is a tale of coercion. The events are told from her point of view: ‘You can’t do this to our two beautiful boys,’ she bleats, while going along with it all the same. But watch her face: Monica Dolan is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa.
MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE THE LITTLE RUSSIAN I confess I had forgotten the origin of the nickname of Tchaikovsky’s folksy and gamesome Second Symphony. It’s the shortest of his six symphonies, and the most Russian – so ‘The Little Russian’ makes sense. It was his good friend Nikolay Kashkin who first used the name. ‘How I love your little Russian,’ he is said to have
exclaimed. ‘All those delightful Ukrainian folk tunes.’ This at a time, of course, when Ukraine was routinely referred to as ‘Little Russia’, a usage dating back to the 14th century, which gradually fell from favour after the 1917 Revolution. Tchaikovsky loved ‘Little Russia’ but was not of it. He’d been born (in 1840) 600 miles north-east of Ukraine in the town of Votkinsk, where his father managed a large factory making cannons, bridges and ships’ anchors. Nowadays, it makes long-range ballistic missiles. In his later years, Tchaikovsky settled in Klin on the Moscow end of the new Moscow-to-St-Petersburg railway. The last of his houses in this semi-rural retreat, the one in which he wrote the Sixth Symphony, has long been the principal Tchaikovsky archive and museum, though I guess none of us will be visiting it any time soon. For 25 years, Tchaikovsky spent part of his summers – and parts of his winters too – on an estate, 200 miles south of Kiev, that was home to his beloved sister, Aleksandra, her wealthy landowning husband, Lev Davydov, and their seven children. He was 25 when he first visited the estate in 1865 and 50 at the time of his sister’s death in 1891 – by which time a certain Chekhovian melancholy had come to haunt both the place and the family. Tchaikovsky was never a nationalist composer, nor a collector of folk songs. Only in the finale of the Second Symphony does he follow Glinka and his fellow nationalists by treating a folk song – The Crane, a song much loved by the Davydov family butler – as the basis for a kaleidoscopically coloured moto perpetuo in the style of the Kamarinskaya, a famously quick-fire Russian dance. If there’s a problem with the symphony, it’s that it’s tricky to bring off. Ideally, you need both a Russian conductor and a Russian orchestra. There’s a 1968 recording by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under the legendary and famously alcohol-fuelled Evgeny Svetlanov that still sounds newly minted 50 years on; or, more recent, an excellent Pentatone CD by the Russian National Orchestra conducted by Mikhail Pletnev. That includes the symphony’s first movement in its original form, as well as in Tchaikovsky’s more familiar cut-down version, which Prokofiev loved to excoriate. Prokofiev himself was Ukrainian, born in 1891 in a village east of Donetsk, though the region held only childhood memories for him. By the age of 13, he was a student The Oldie May 2022 67
