BBC1’s The Miniaturist (26/7 December) is a lavish two-part adaptation of Jessie Burton’s bestseller. It’s also further proof that almost any geographical and historical setting can be conscripted to tell us what’s apparently the only story we’re interested in these days: an alliance of plucky and unfailingly virtuous black people, gay people and women taking on the repressive forces of straight white blokes.
The main character, Nella (Anya Taylor-Joy), is ostensibly a young 17th-century Dutchwoman who’s been married off to a rich Amsterdam merchant. On closer inspection, though, she turns out to be a 21st-century feminist who’s somehow been transported back in time to show our benighted forebears the error of their patriarchal ways.
At first, admittedly, it seems as if the programme will be a straightforward mix of Rebecca and Girl with a Pearl Earring, as Nella walks timidly through a series of immaculate Dutch interiors (cue those black-and-white tiled floors), while being alternately frowned at and rebuked by her husband’s Mrs Danvers-like sister, Marin. Nella’s mousiness, however, doesn’t last. Before long, she’s befriended a kindly black servant and a feisty maid, informed her husband that ‘I want to be your wife [not] just someone you own, like a dog’, and begun to show an increasingly shrewd understanding of the international sugar trade. As part of her stand against bigotry in all its forms, she even gets the puritan Marin (Romola Garai) to realise there are more important things in life than God — female solidarity for one.
The obvious trouble is that, whereas Marin manages to shake off her irritating piety, the programme itself never does. The Miniaturist is always lovely to look at and the cast are uniformly good, despite too often having to deliver lines of slightly portentous, viewer-nudging dialogue.
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