I know nothing about Patricia Highsmith. The acclaimed American author wrote the kind of Sunday-night crime thrillers that put me to sleep. Her best-known creation, the suave psychopath Thomas Ripley, has spawned a number of films that I’ve carefully avoided. But ignorance is an ideal starting point for Switzerland, by Joanna Murray-Smith, a brilliantly nasty comedy that features Highsmith in 1995 when she was past her artistic best. What a piece of work. A foul-mouthed, booze-soaked, chain-smoking misanthrope squatting in a glass-fronted hermitage in the mountains with nothing but a typewriter, a whisky bottle and an Alpine panorama for company. (Actually, it sounds quite tempting, put like that.)
Her solitude is broken by a New York yuppie, Edward, on a mission from her publisher to secure a final instalment in the Ripley series. Edward whops the contract down on the table. Highsmith orders him out. But he stands his ground. We learn that he’s not the first emissary to assail the dragon in her lair. Highsmith evicted a previous applicant at knifepoint. But Edward charms her with gifts of Campbell’s soup and peanut butter and she grudgingly allows him to stay. Then, a bombshell. She’s suffering from writer’s block. The storyline for the Ripley novel is complete but she lacks a final chapter. They make a deal. Highsmith will sign the contract if Edward can devise an ingenious, original and plausible murder to end the book.
The show then morphs into an oddball flat-share comedy. Highsmith serves her guest a cooked breakfast while tabulating the merits of various deadly toxins. Arsenic is her favourite, she says, as Edward picks at his omelette, because it happens to be invisible and odourless. Is she trying to bump off her co-author? Phyllis Logan plays Highsmith as a super-brainy sourpuss whose bilious opinions are tolerable, and even admirable, because they wear no cloak of political acceptability.
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