Easter’s over. And after a long weekend stuffing yourself with chocolate eggs and lamb you might not be feeling quite yourself.
Well, the good news is that you’re not alone: everyone in the second part of Jamaica Inn is struggling with who they are. And it isn’t even Easter there yet. They’re only just having Christmas.
At the risk of sounding like the fourth paragraph of a GCSE essay on Jamaica Inn, the theme of identity runs strong through Episode 2. Even the stolen horse that Jem Merlyn sells back to its original owner must be confuzzled about who it is after being disguised. He probably thinks he’s Charles Laughton or something.
But none are so confused as Mary (Britain’s Most Beautiful Pout, Jessica Brown Findlay) who, in helping the very smugglers she despises, is aware she’s losing the innocence she thinks defines her.
That confusion is further compounded by the discovery that her father was a smuggler, and that she has the hots for bad boy/Cornish horse counterfeiter, Jem Merlyn. What is a girl to do?
Feeeling guilty about lying to the magistrate, worried about the person she is becoming, and without Cosmo to write in to, she confides her sins in the handsome Francis Davey, (Ben Daniels, bringing the sexy back in a cassock). There hasn’t been a Reverend as dishy as Davey since…Crilly? Cadfael? Lovejoy?…no, Davey is the dishiest vicar on screen. No wonder his church is so packed on a Sunday.
But Rev. Davey is more than he seems. He’s planning to bring down the smugglers’ racket. Mary’s just the woman he needs for the job. Or she might be if she weren’t gallivanting around Christmas markets with Jem Merlyn, a man whose identity is impossible to pin down.
Is he a heroic rogue or salty villain? (Shh, don’t tell me, I’ve not read the book). He’s too laissez-faire to know or care; keen to indulge in theatrics and deception with Mary by dressing her up as a bloke and telling her she can pretend to be whoever she wants so long as she smiles.
Naturally Mary falls for him, and you can’t blame her: Matthew McNulty manages to be confident yet vulnerable, like a big dog with its paw wedged in a mousetrap. Like everyone else he is a product of screenwriter Emma Frost’s ability to take Du Maurier’s characters and translate them to the screen without loss of fidelity. If anything she gives us the deeper shades of grey of each character. Or maybe that’s just the HD TVs these days…
No one embodies that more than Sean Harris’ domineering Joss Merlyn, who gives it his all in a bestial drunken confession. It doesn’t matter that you can only understand about fifty percent of what he’s slurring; Harris’s physicality conveys the other fifty with the torture of a man who can only face his real self when reflected through the bottom of a rum bottle. He’s racked by guilt and filled with self-loathing.
Not too dissimilar to any of us after an Easter weekend then. Damn those chocolate eggs…
Aired at 9pm on Tuesday 22 April 2014 on BBC One.
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