The Daughter of Time was worth the wait

Spectator

5 hours ago

That it has taken its sweet time getting here cannot be denied, but, at last, it has happened. More than 70 years after the novel by Josephine Tey became an overnight sensation in 1951, a stage adaptation of The Daughter of Time has arrived in the West End.
Voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association back in 1990, The Daughter of Time is Tey's most unusual but brilliant detective story. It's her most unusual because its sees her Inspector Alan Grant – the central character in five of her detective stories – solving a crime from his hospital bed while recovering from a broken leg. And it's arguably her most brilliant because the crime he solves is one of British history's coldest and most high-profile cases – who murdered the Princes in the Tower in 1483.
Yet while it's a brilliant book, because most of the action happens either inside Grant's head or in his hospital room, it has probably been judged undramatisable – until now. Playing at the Charing Cross Theatre just off Villiers Street, American playwright M. Kilburg Reedy's stage adaption takes Tey's classic and serves it up with a leavening Shakespearian twist. And what a historical tour de force it is. If you don't know your 15th-century history or House of York genealogy, you certainly will do after an evening here (the programme helpfully includes a family tree).
We begin with Grant, who believes he can discern an individual's character through their face, so when his friend – glamorous actress Marta Hallard (played to the nines by Rachel Pickup) – brings him a selection of historical pictures to peruse, he becomes obsessed by the portrait of Richard III. This man doesn't resemble the devious hunchback of history who schemed his way to the throne and then had his nephews murdered in the Tower of London. If anything he looks cautious, thinks Grant (played with great bravura by Rob Pomfret) – sober, decent, more suited to the bench than the dock.
So, since he's a detective and has nothing better to do, Grant embarks on a police-style investigation – complete with a board, map and pinned-up photographs of key individuals all connected with string – where with assistance from his sergeant (the excellent Sanya Adegbola) and a young lovelorn American named Brent Carradine (played by Harrison Sharpe, who nearly walks off with the show) he examines the contemporary and near-contemporary evidence for what really happened to the sons of Edward IV – namely Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York.
What Grant discovers doesn't match up with what the traditional history and Tudor propagandists would have us believe. Chief among those propagandists was, of course, William Shakespeare. His history play Richard III was written in the early 1590s and was required to align with the sentiments of Elizabeth I, granddaughter of the man who defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485 – Henry Tudor. Rarely in the history of drama (probably not until Alan Rickman gave us Hans Gruber in Die Hard, anyway) has such a delicious, vile but downright charismatic villain ever been conceived as the Bard's 'poisonous bunch-backed toad'.
The problem is that the play Shakespeare wrote was mostly rubbish, based on a fishy narrative written by Thomas More in the 1510s. What Tey's book did so expertly was to take Thomas More's version and tear it to pieces, largely by drawing on records and evidence that was much closer to the events described than More ever was. In Reedy's stage play, the same meticulous dissection takes place; so what we get is a journey through historical evidence that exposes the inconsistencies and omissions of the sources and the evidence upon which Shakespeare concocted his version of Richard III. And it's a historical romp – one delivered with all the impassion vim of Simon Schama after his second round of Weetabix.
Of course, since it's a dramatisation there are deviations from the original. First, Reedy has taken the implied romance between Grant and Marta Hallard from the book and turned it into a full-blown subplot, one which turns – irony of ironies – on an act of deception that could have graced the pages of a Shakespeare comedy. This however fits remarkably neatly with another change introduced by Reedy, which is to use a Shakespearian actor, Simon Templeton (played brilliantly by Noah Huntley), to give voice to the Tudor 'case' against Richard III.
And it works. While Tey's original dialogue is flawless – and Reedy used as much of it as she could, she says – there is so much more to the play, and many more laughs than one would have expected too (thanks not least to the nurses played by Hafsa Abbasi and Janna Fox).
For fans of the book, the most significant change to the story comes in the selection of the killer of the young princes. Drawing on original sources, the playwright has come to a different conclusion – but it's one which I think holds just as much water as Tey's prime suspect. It certainly works in the context of the play, even if there are many people around now who believe (based on sound evidence by the way) that both princes actually survived the reign of Richard III and didn't die at all in 1483.
What would Tey have made of the playwright's handiwork? I'm not sure she would have approved of the romantic subplot, since she never chose to marry Grant off herself and she could have done in his last outing (The Singing Sands of 1952), published posthumously. But – and it's an important but – the rest of it, I think, is spot on. At the heart of her book is the very probable innocence of Richard III and the concomitant calumny done against him ever since, something this lively play brings indisputably to life. 'Truth is the daughter of time, not authority,' is the Francis Bacon quote that inspired the title. Time will tell if this is the play that finally gets Richard III off the historical naughty step.
The Daughter of Time is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 13 September.