Timothy Spall shines in true life drama of desire and death

The Sixth Commandment is a powerful reminder of the vast range of humans’ sexual needs and desires.

Timothy Spall, Anne Reid, and Éanna Hardwicke in The Sixth Commandment

The Sixth Commandment is about killing but it’s also about sex and sensuality and romantic love and what can happen when people don’t get enough of them. As the title suggests, it’s also about Christianity and its power to enrich and distort, and of course, as a true-life murder story, it’s about evil and the charm and coercion that can underpin that evil.

That might sound a bit much for a weekend on the couch, but this four-part British offering is very good and very watchable, and not just for the extraordinary star turn of British actor Timothy Spall. (Released in July this year, the show was too late for this year’s BAFTAs, but watch this space.) Indeed, some critics have pronounced the BBC drama almost perfect television but the show, written by Sarah Phelps (A Very British Scandal) has its faults: it’s a fraction long, it gets distracted at times by a not-very interesting bunch of investigating detectives, and the first episode is so good that there’s a comparative lack of tension later. Even so, it’s a masterful adaptation of terrible events that goes far beyond murder to address the vulnerability and exploitation that can exist in relationships.

The show is based on events in the pretty village of Maids Moreton in Buckinghamshire, and the trial in 2019 of Ben Field, a churchwarden, and his friend, magician Martyn Smith. Both were charged with the murder of local resident Peter Farquhar, an author and retired teacher, four years earlier, and the conspiracy to murder another retired teacher and neighbour, Ann Moore-Martin, who died of natural causes in 2017. Field was convicted of the murder but acquitted of the conspiracy charge and Smith was acquitted on all counts. Field had earlier pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and burglary against Farquhar and Moore-Martin.

The show begins with the inexorable seduction of the 67-year-old Farquhar by the twenty-something Field and the coercion is truly chilling. But so, too, are scenes in which the older man, thin and tight, opens like a flower in the sun under longed-for love and attention from the younger man. The show’s willingness to treat such delicate and complex emotion separates it from the usual true-crime genre. The rake on the make, cunningly inserting himself or herself into the life of an older person in order to profit from their will is a cliche, a stereotype that is easily rendered, but The Sixth Commandment sets out to tell a more nuanced story.

When Spall’s character, a homosexual man who has followed the dictates of his church and remained celibate all his life, tells Field that “I don’t want sex. I want to hold and to be held”, we are invited to witness pain and passion, religious commitment and desire in equal measure. Later Farquhar explodes to his brother, who is concerned about his growing relationship with Field (played by Éanna Hardwicke). “You can’t imagine my life before Ben, but I need you to imagine – my absolute despair,” he says. “You can stand with (your wife) in the sight of God … your life is full, but I have to be untouched, unloved and live only a fraction of my life, and that is in torment and loneliness and self-loathing and grief. But Ben has brought me to life – I am loved.”

The script is equally nuanced when it moves to Moore-Martin (Anne Reid) and her later seduction by Field. A single woman, and a Catholic, “Aunty Anne” is also much attached to religion. She’s also a lively, well-adjusted 81-year-old when Field enters bearing gardening tools and affection. Theirs is a physical relationship, Moore-Martin tells her horrified niece. The world might gossip about the age difference but Reid renders Moore-Martin as a fully-formed personality who embraces this unexpected joy. Later she will lament being duped but thanks to the script, the actor and Saul Dibb’s restrained direction, Moore-Martin’s vulnerability is heroic in its honesty rather than pitiable.

Some critics have suggested we could have done with more of the somewhat gormless Martyn Smith, played by Conor MacNeill. (Field’s modus operandi appeared to include installing him as a lodger in the homes of his prospective victims). We are indeed left wondering, but the show’s creators doubtless were restricted in how far they could go in depicting events, given the jury found Smith innocent of all charges. (MacNeill’s performance in the dock as a bewildered Smith when told by the judge that he is free to go is a tiny gem that proves how much a good actor can draw from mere moments.)

No restraint is needed with the characterisation of Field, who is serving a life term with a non-parole period of 36 years, but again The Sixth Commandment resists the obvious. Money was behind the seductions but Hardwicke gives a performance that is distressing because his motivation is not easily explained. There is arrogance and cruelty and a distorted belief in his power as a religious figure but the writer does not attempt to give a definitive answer to the question of “why”.

Spall’s Farquhar is a fully-rounded figure, in part because the author kept detailed diaries and writings in the years leading to his murder. Spall, surely one of the best actors of his generation, who lost an epic amount of weight for this role, is superb as the funny, clever, successful Farquhar who is enormously loved by family, friends, colleagues and students but whose sexual aloneness and despair make him an easy target for Field.

Sex is a mainstay of the stories we are told on the screen as in literature. As British author Hanif Kureishi writes in a recent essay on his Substack, given the relatively small amount of time we actually spend having sex in our lives, it’s extraordinary how much creative effort is devoted to the subject. In this essay he writes about losing his sexual capacity after an “immobilising” fall. But the interesting bit is that he now wonders what all the fuss was about.

Kureishi’s “public” potency as a sexually attractive writer of sexy stories provides him with great confidence in admitting that he’s celibate (at least for now) and that maybe, just maybe, the whole damn thing is overrated.

The “victims” in The Sixth Commandment start from a very different base – old, alone, lacking touch and attention – but like Kureishi’s confessional essay, their stories are powerful reminders of the vast range of humans’ sexual needs and desires.

The Sixth Commandment is on Binge.