Review: In ‘The Secret Agent,’ a tale of political intrigue doesn’t lose sight of its human drama

Coming to American television immediately following the anniversary of 9/11, via the streaming service Acorn TV, “The Secret Agent” is the fourth BBC adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel of anarchists in the UK.

Set in 1886 and inspired by a real event, the Greenwich Observatory bombing of 1884, the novel was also the basis of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 film “Sabotage,” with its famous sequence of a boy unwittingly carrying a bomb onto a crowded bus. Though Conrad subtitled the book “a simple tale of the 19th century,” the social and political currents it describes were still abroad in the 20th, and would soon help usher in the First World War.

Screenwriter and playwright Tony Marchant makes Conrad’s out-of-order timeline conventionally chronological, reassigns some dialogue and inserts some new action for purposes of intensity and suspense — business as usual in turning literature into television. But the miniseries — which debuts in three parts, Monday through Wednesday, with each episode remaining available after its premiere — is generally faithful to the shape of the novel and the interior lives of its characters, if not always their physical descriptions. Directed by Charles McDougall with perhaps a surfeit of darkness and drear, it’s a satisfying adaptation that grows more powerful as it grows more dreadful.

Marchant sets his opening scene, appropriately enough, on Guy Fawkes Night, Britain’s ironic, fireworks-fueled celebration of the man who tried to blow up Parliament. Here we meet meet Mr. Verloc (Toby Jones), the proprietor of what I guess you’d call a Victorian sex shop; his wife, Winnie (Vicky McClure); and her developmentally challenged brother, Stevie (Charlie Hamblett). After hours, Verloc hosts meetings of an anarchist cell, upon which he is also informing, fitfully, to the (pre-revolutionary) Russians.

His cellmates include Ossipon (Raphael Acloque), who flirts with Winnie; Michaelis (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), a writer lately out of prison, who has been taken up by a society woman; and the Professor (the always memorable Ian Hart), who goes about London in a big coat wired with explosives and a detonator ever ready in his hand. Broadly speaking, they represent three faces of revolution: the opportunist, the idealist and the nutcase. The police, we learn from chief inspector Heat (Stephen Graham), do not consider them particularly capable or worrisome; and though they are nominally a group, they are hardly in agreement.

Things start to happen when Verloc’s new Russian boss, Mr. Vladimir (David Dawson), decides that England, “absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty,” requires “a jolly good scare” to bring in a more repressive social order, and tells Verloc, who has barely been earning his secret agent pay, he is the person to do it. His own life threatened and much to his displeasure, Verloc becomes a terrorist.

Short and round with a bulldog face and a melancholy demeanor that serves him well in comedy and tragedy alike, Jones is, as usual, excellent; his final scene with the invaluable McClure, nearly a monologue, has an almost theatrical weight. (It’s not surprising to learn that in 1923 Conrad himself turned his novel into a three-act play.)

Marchant doesn’t let his audience forget that this is a story that might have some relevance to our own terrorized times. But “The Secret Agent” works on the page and on the screen because, ultimately, it’s not a political but a particular human story that runs on a mixture of bad decisions and bad luck, out where psychologies and circumstances run afoul of history.

‘The Secret Agent’

Where: Acorn TV

When: New episodes debut to stream through Wednesday via Acorn TV

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

On Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

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