Photo courtesy of Masterpiece Theatre
Beecham House
Packing pistols on his hip and wearing a long duster and a black Stetson-like hat, John Beecham looks like someone Clint Eastwood could have played in a western. Only “Beecham House” is an eastern—set in India in 1795. Beecham is a renegade Englishman but a successful one. He’s earned enough money to make himself master of a palace outside Delhi.
“Beecham House” is a Masterpiece production available locally on PBS Password to Friends of Milwaukee PBS. It stars Tom Bateman (Murder on the Orient Express) as John Beecham, leading a mostly one-note cast (at least in the first two episodes). However, filmed in London’s Ealing Studios as well as in India, the production boasts enough exotic sumptuousness to fill the domains of several maharajahs.
Beecham is the laconic action hero who can gun down a bandit at 10 yards without blinking. He’s also a brooding Heathcliff haunted by his own past. Beecham broke with the British East India Company, the private corporation chartered to monopolize British interests in India until, in 1858, Parliament sacked the scoundrels and assumed direct control of the subcontinent. In flashbacks, Beecham recalls the depravity of the company’s private army against the natives, the pillage and the rape.
The screenplay allows Beecham to be the spokesman for the good English of India, but as his French rival says, “the British are never more treacherous than when they espouse virtue.” Well, maybe, but not John Beecham!
Among the supporting cast is Lesley Nicol (“Downton Abbey”) as Beecham’s tut-tutting mother. Her unthinking chauvinism extends to foisting English names on the Indian servants. Imagine her reaction when she learns that her son has fathered a child with an Indian woman.
Writer-director Gurinder Chadha came to prominence with her deeply-felt, human-scale film Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Here, she seems lost amidst the lavishness, drawing dialogue and plot from a common pool of literary stereotypes inherited by Hollywood and recirculated throughout the world.
