By Sandra Hall
Wicked Little Letters
MA, 100 minute
In cinemas March 21
Reviewed by SANDRA HALL
★★★★
Armando Iannucci, creator of the scabrous political spoof The Thick of It, has revealed he hired a consultant to further embroider the diatribes delivered by the series’ notoriously foul-mouthed anti-hero, Malcolm Tucker.
This set me wondering if the same expert had been at work on the script for Wicked Little Letters, which also delights in some extremely creative swearing.
It’s a fictionalised version of the case of the Littlehampton Letters, a story that transfixed the British public in the early 1920s when a series of obscene poison pen letters started circulating in the Sussex town of Littlehampton. Long forgotten, the case came to light again in 2017 when historian Christopher Hilliard wrote a book about it and screenwriter Jonny Sweet spotted the comic potential.
Olivia Colman plays Edith Swan, the main victim in Wicked Little Letters.
Olivia Colman weighed in next to play Edith Swan, the main victim, and Jessie Buckley was cast as Rose Gooding, the free-spirited Irishwoman who was charged with writing the letters and arrested despite the lack of evidence.
She and Edith, who are next-door neighbours, have been feuding. Put that together with Rose’s taste for smoking, drinking and tossing four-letter words around, and the Littlehampton police force decides it has a case. At least two of its members do. The third, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), Sussex’s first and only female police officer, believes Rose is innocent and refuses to change her mind no matter what.
This is all nutritious fodder for what British comedy does best – sending up national attitudes and institutions. Class, snobbery and the claustrophobic nature of a certain kind of village life feed into Sweet’s script as his highly developed taste for the absurd kicks in.
The street of cramped terraces at the centre of the story hardly fits the conventional picture of an English village but it has all the other credentials. Everybody knows much too much about everybody else and wild speculation fills in the blanks to give us a joyously exaggerated microcosm of the values and customs of working-class England between the wars.
The Swans and Rose’s household find it impossible to ignore one another. The metal bathtub in which they wash is passed between the houses and the terrace’s dividing walls are so thin the enthusiastic love-making Rose enjoys with her partner, Bill (Malachi Kirby), wakes up prim and pious Edith every night.
Oddly enough, they start as friends. Edith is thoroughly under the thumb of her father – an entertainingly obnoxious performance by the usually affable Timothy Spall – and she gets a few moments of guilty pleasure out of Rose’s criticisms of him until he sees what’s happening and that’s the end of that.
The whole cast is wonderful and the script gives them plenty of time to flesh out their characters.
Colman and Buckley catch the complexities that lie beneath Edith and Rose’s animosity towards one another and Vasan makes a real hero out of Rose’s champion, Officer Moss. Wearing the wide-eyed expression of a small nocturnal animal that can never afford to let its guard down, she silently seethes at her two male colleagues’ smug condescension and ignores their orders to drop the case.
She then finds some unlikely allies from the Women’s Whist Club and presses on. Played by Eileen Atkins, Joanna Scanlan and stand-up comic Lolly Adefope, these three become amateur sleuths while behaving as an irreverent Greek chorus as they dispense useful insights into the workings of the neighbourhood.
It’s not the most sophisticated of satires but it has a gloriously antic spirit and it sends you out on a high – no small thing these days.
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