Would you want to marry a spy? After watching Betrayal, probably not.
Writer David Eldridge has used the paradigm of the secret world as a means of exploring relationships both personal and professional, and how one is liable to corrode and distort the other. A quote from the 13th Century Persian poet Rumi is dropped in as a clue – “the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces.”
The Persian link is apposite, since the story orbits around an Iranian plot to stage a terrorist outrage somewhere in the Manchester area. Our somewhat flawed protagonist is MI5 agent John Hughes, played by Shaun Evans with a tense, haunted quality, like a man on the run from his own past.
Which he is, to some extent. He clearly possesses many of the requirements of a successful agent, like bloody-minded tenacity and an instinct for when something feels wrong, but he’s been using up his nine lives. He’s been guilty of several “wrong-reaction episodes” (as spook terminology would have it), and it looks like he’s just committed another one at the start of the first instalment. He finds himself involved in a two-corpse meltdown while he’s meeting a contact at a motorway services. It subsequently appears that the case he was investigating shouldn’t have been an MI5 matter anyway, and should have been left to the cops.
John’s rather snippy boss Simone Grant (Nikki Amuka-Bird, pictured above) seems more inclined to follow bureaucratic process than to indulge his insistence that his now-dead contact had information about a potential terror attack, and his theory of the link between Iranian bad guys and brutal Manchester drug baron Craig Beeston (Anthony Flanagan). She finds him a bit of a nuisance, so instead of backing him, she sends him an invitation to take voluntary redundancy.
All of this feeds into the painful turbulence that is turning John’s home life into another kind of battlefield. He has two young kids with his wife Claire (Romola Garai, pictured below), but the unpredictable hours and obligatory secrecy of his MI5 work have been cranking up the strain on their relationship for many years. She’s sick of him invoking the Official Secrets Act every time she asks him a question. They’ve finally succumbed to couples therapy, where they sit looking at each other like time travellers who have flown in from opposite ends of the known universe.
Claire thinks him quitting the job is a great idea, but John doesn’t appreciate getting a lecture from Claire’s dad, agreeing with her. For her part, Claire has never quite managed to forgive John for his affair with a work-mate a few years back, while John is becoming suspicious of his wife’s friendship with Martin, the boss of the medical agency where she works as a doctor. When she gets dolled up to have dinner with him, putting on what the Daily Mail would call “a leggy display”, neon signs start flashing.
Where too many series outstay their welcome, the four-part format of Betrayal feels like it has short-changed itself a bit, with the finale having to leap through plot-hoops with slightly indecent haste. Before we get there, we’ve had a slippery ride through various devious twists and deceptions, as John battles gangland scumbags and tries to thwart a sarin gas attack. But what it does successfully is to depict the way intelligence work is often mundane, dirty and squalid, a seedy back-street affair rather than a globe-trotting thrill ride starring Tom Cruise. It’s also a platform for a pair of splendid and contrasting performances from Messrs Evans and Garai.
Betrayal continues on ITV1 on Mondays at 9pm. All episodes available on ITVX
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