Spies of Warsaw: A story of derring-do, set in a city the Nazis were soon to destroy

原文地址http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9776413/Spies-of-Warsaw-A-story-of-derring-do-set-in-a-city-the-Nazis-were-soon-to-destroy.html
BBC Four's new drama is a noirish thriller in which Warsaw's cityscape features prominently says Olly Grant.
                
                
By Olly Grant
7:00AM GMT 09 Jan 2013
In October 1944, Heinrich Himmler issued the following order to his SS commanders: “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth … No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.”
 The city in question was Warsaw, and by 1945 Himmler’s toxic endlösung for the Polish capital was essentially complete. The scale of the destruction is hard to digest: 63 days of bombing, 200,000 dead, 85 per cent of buildings obliterated.
 Given that backdrop, it’s a miracle that Warsaw still exists today, let alone that it should be providing the setting for a new pre-war drama starring David Tennant. Spies of Warsaw, which is based on a novel by American writer Alan Furst, sees Tennant playing an undercover agent in late-Thirties Poland. Described as “Tinker Tailor meets Casablanca”, it’s a noirish thriller where the cityscape features prominently – which surprised many when BBC Four held a press conference to announce the drama. Why on earth have you come to Warsaw, asked the reporters, if you want to evoke the Thirties?
 The simple answer is the Old Town. When the war ended, the surviving Varsovians rebuilt the city’s 13th-century core from scratch, re-sculpting its warren of streets from sketches, photos, even vedute oil paintings. Which explains why, one warm day in central Warsaw, I’m able to watch Tennant filming in what looks like a picture-portrait version of pre-Himmler Poland. Extras slouch moodily on the cobbles in fedoras and flat-caps. A vintage Citroën lounges against a wall covered in Polish signs with Deco typeface.
 “You couldn’t build a set of the Old Town if you tried,” says Tennant, with mild understatement, when we meet for a chat. He is relaxing in 21st-century T-shirt and shorts, the day’s collar and waistcoat hanging ready for his next sortie into the 1930s. The period authenticity is so strong in the Old Town, he says, that the same streets even doubled as pre-war Berlin for some sequences. “They were hanging up banners with swastikas. There was something terribly chilling about seeing people come out of their dressing rooms in full Nazi regalia. Especially doing it here, in a city that was so ill-treated by that regime; which has such a graphic, ghastly history of what Hitler was capable of.” He pauses. “I have to say, the locals were very understanding.”
One of the interesting things about Spies is that war is the most important fixture in the drama – and yet, like Godot, never actually appears. The hero of the tale is the one man who does expect it to turn up: Tennant’s Jean-Francois Mercier, a (fictional) Warsaw-based French agent who becomes convinced that Hitler is concocting invasion plans. “He has some undercover contacts that he’s working on, and he does a bit of crawling under barbed wire, and he starts to uncover things that, actually, his French superiors don’t want to know about,” says Tennant.
 The job of the actors, in a sense, was to perform a mental equivalent of what Poles did with the Old Town: forget 1944; construct a pre-existent world. “When we look back on World War Two now, we look back with a sense of a certain inevitability,” Tennant, 41, explains. “But if you were actually living through that, it’s important to remember that people would always have been looking for a way out. And, of course, in Britain and across Europe, appeasement was a hugely popular movement.
 “There was this sense that war might be avoided. That Hitler was a bit of a rogue, but he wasn’t all that bad and if we tolerated him a bit we could get him on-side.”
 It’s this climate of anxiety that makes 1938 a more dramatically rich setting, in some ways, than the conflict itself – at least according to the men who adapted the script, Porridge creators Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. “As for World War Two, how many more stories can we really tell about it?” muses La Frenais, 77, when I catch up with them. They are sitting outside a palace near Warsaw; La Frenais, impish, with ageing-rock-god hair, Clement, 75, the softly spoken straight man.
 What they loved about Spies, says La Frenais, was its inherent tension – “that extraordinary sense of the world being on the brink of cataclysmic change.” That and the fact that it’s a spy thriller, which, despite a career that spans The Likely Lads, The Commitments and Never Say Never Again, is fresh territory. “Actually we love this genre,” says Clement. “In fact, for years we wanted to do Le Carré but never managed it. Alan Furst is the nearest thing, in a way. Great plots. Wonderful characters. And that sense of uncertainty surrounding everything; particularly with the romance that you get here, which gives it that quality of Casablanca – of love that’s threatened by events.”
 Tennant is keen to point out that (as with Casablanca) the fact that some of those events are real gives Spies its punch. “It’s looking at things from a historical perspective. And I think that gives it more texture than a wham-bam, derring-do story – though it has all that stuff, too.”
Spies of Warsaw begins on BBC Four on Wednesday 9 January at 9.00pm