Murder Is Easy review – shines a whole new light on this Agatha Christie classic

I wonder if the best call an actor can get from their agent is the offer of a part in an Agatha Christie adaptation. The opening credits for Murder Is Easy offer a tantalising roll call of big TV names, including Penelope Wilton, Mark Bonnar, Mathew Baynton and Jon Pointing, but the thing about a murder mystery in which the murderer has a rather long hitlist is that most of them appear for only a scene or two. It seems as if it could be one of the easiest gigs in town.

The busiest of the lot, though, is Industry’s David Jonsson, who stars as Luke Fitzwilliam, refashioned from the retired English police officer of the original novel into a Nigerian attache, who has travelled to the UK to take up a position at Whitehall. The action, of which there is plenty, has been moved forward a couple of decades, to 1953, and there are reworkings of certain characters and plot points. Screenwriter Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre’s tweaking of the story suggests an inventive and imaginative new take on the 1939 original. The first half takes the most liberties with its source material and is by far the strongest, hinting at Fitzwilliam’s divided loyalties as a member of the ruling elite and a colonised subject of a nation close to independence. His conversations with his Nigerian friends in London, about pride, duty and obligation, make the prospect of him being dropped into a mostly white country village in the mid-20th century even more tantalising a dramatic prospect.

Yet this early promise soon fades into the background as Murder Is Easy settles in as a quintessentially BBC Christie adaptation. Fitzwilliam meets a woman named Lavinia Pinkerton (Wilton) on a train. Pinky, as she is known to her friends, tells him she is on her way to report murder – note the vagueness as to how many murders she is planning to report – and ropes him into a guessing game that casts him in the role of lead detective, though for the sake of this version, it is in an amateur capacity only. Pinky’s previously sleepy village has seen the deaths of too many residents for it not to be suspicious, and she is on the verge of joining the dots and exposing the responsible party.

Intrigued by the bait Pinkerton has left for him, Fitzwilliam travels to the village to investigate, meeting a classic murder-mystery cast that includes the vicar, the doctor and the lord of the manor. But there is an element of class war here, too, as the neighbouring village, where the poor people live, begins to boil over with resentment at how the rich are treating them, not least in the planning of a new town, which appears to be upsetting everyone within a 20-mile radius.

It throws a touch of feminism on to the fire, as the self-proclaimed “averagely observant secretary” Bridget Conway (Morfydd Clark) teams up with Fitzwilliam to add her better-than-average observation skills to the hunt for the killer; she notices details about hat colour and heels, for example, that only a woman might notice. And Fitzwilliam himself becomes a curious new presence in the village, accepted, in that he is part of the establishment, and also reminded that he is an outsider, covertly and overtly, when one of the villagers turns out to have a small private library of books on eugenics. It even touches on the ethics of the collection of historical objects from colonial nations, though in the end, it observes more than pushes the point.

Murder Is Easy begins to struggle under the weight of all it is trying to do and, by the second episode, the focus starts to fade, and its light touch is lost, as it both overexplains and underexplains what is going on, depending on the scene. Fitzwilliam talks about who has power and why it matters; other characters explain that women are often undervalued. It drifts towards the end as if it has run out of steam, and it feels strange for the festive Christie to be set at the height of summer – a tennis-whites Christmas, perhaps.

Related: Agatha Christie’s family welcome diversity in new BBC adaptation

Adaptations of old novels should be free to do whatever they want to the source material. In this case, the choices made shine a different light on the story, and these choices don’t force it into a new shape, but instead suggest taking another look at it, from an angle that might not have seemed obvious until now. It works perfectly well, though in the end, this becomes more of a routine whodunnit than it first suggests.

• Murder Is Easy was on BBC One and is available on iPlayer