“It’s hard to think of a better casting choice than the great Lennie James” as Barrington Walker in BBC One’s adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s 2013 novel “Mr Loverman”. “You can’t visualise anyone else” as the “dapper, roguish” septuagenarian, driving around in his “gleaming Daimler”.
He’s been married to the “God-fearing” Carmel for half a century but their marriage is clearly “under strain”. Carmel is “fed up” with her husband’s antics; he regularly stays out late drinking and ends up “rolling home” in the early hours, said Pat Stacy in the Irish Independent.
It turns out Barry has been the “secret lover” and “soulmate” of his best friend, Morris, since their boyhood in Antigua, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. This is the story of a “good life built on lies”; their happiness is “almost palpable” when on screen together, but the “50 misspent years are tragic and their effects corrosive”.
As he faces up to old age, Barry “knows time is running out and regrets are rushing in”. He promises Morris that he is finally ready to leave Carmel but his lover looks at him with “weary tenderness” – they have “been here before” many times.
Despite its painful examination of the community’s deep-rooted homophobia, this is no “miseryfest”. “There is plenty of light as well as shade”, much of which is provided by Barry and Carmel’s “high-maintenance drama queen” younger daughter Maxine (Tamara Lawrance).
“I didn’t really get on with it in the beginning”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. The opening episode “screams ‘adapted from a book'” – it felt as if writer Nathaniel Price was “so reverential” to Evaristo’s novel that he had “thrown in” every one of the Booker prize-winning author’s lines rather than having the “confidence to pare it down”. The show takes the characters’ “innermost thoughts” from the page and translates them into a voiceover that “clutters” each scene.
But I’m glad I “persevered”. The narration gradually becomes “less obtrusive and the characters more appealing”. Throughout the series, there are flashbacks to Barry’s early relationship with Morris in Antigua but it’s the present-day scenes of his life in east London “with their exploration of love and longing in old age” that are “the strongest”.
Evaristo’s “clever, sparky novel is relatively short”, added Carol Midgley in The Times, and as the action is “stretched” across eight episodes it can make the series feel at times like it’s moving at a “glacial pace”. Even if you sometimes wish things would “speed up a bit”, though, James is “layered and twinkling” as Barry, and Sharon D. Clarke gives a “stand-out performance” as the long-suffering Carmel, wearing the “disappointment, hurt and rage” of spending most of her life with a husband she knows is cheating in “every movement of her body”. The final scenes when Barry and Carmel are “pulling at the entrails of their rotted marriage” are “easily the best”.
All in all, “Mr Loverman” is a “wonderfully complex” show that threads together issues spanning everything from sexuality and racism to marital breakdown and infidelity, said Jeff Ingold on the i news site. It’s “rare and powerful to see two elderly Black gay men on-screen in love – and having sex”, and the series should be “celebrated” as part of the “changing cultural tide” bringing these stories to the mainstream.