‘Countess Alice’ an Elegant Mystery

“The Countess Alice” is a good way to spend 90 minutes. The strengths of this elegant new “Masterpiece Theatre” drama derive much less from its script--a rather thin rendering about eroding ties between mother and daughter--than from the luminous performances of the actresses playing those roles.

The BBC production--airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24--unites Wendy Hiller and Zoe Wanamaker in a bittersweet contemporary story by Allan Cubitt that is part mystery, part character study.

That grand dame Hiller is 80-year-old Englishwoman Alice, Countess von Holzendorf, whose marriage to a long-dead German count intrigues Nick Black (Duncan Bell), a free-lance journalist doing a magazine article on Alice and other former society belles of the 1930s. He brings a lilt to Alice’s life.

But it’s Connie (Wanamaker), the middle-aged daughter with whom Alice shares a London flat and a life of genteel meagerness, who drives the story toward enigma and conflict by making a shocking discovery while visiting the former Von Holzendorf home in East Germany. That the revelation comes in a graveyard makes it all the more eerie.

Director Moira Armstrong’s juxtapositions of Alice in London and Connie in East Germany crystallize the gap widening between the two women and its crushing impact on their ever-shattering relationship. Hereafter, Hiller, at once vulnerable and stoically aristocratic, and Wanamaker, her face a mask of teary devastation, seize the moment with their memorable acting, transforming “The Countess Alice” into a demonstration of scintillating stagecraft.