So Rachel Cooke didn’t buy the dramatic premise of Apple Tree Yard – she found the sex scenes risible (Comment). Fair enough. She was also disturbed by the approval the programme found among those in the tabloid press, who saw it as a call to abandon political correctness concerning the price of women’s sexual freedom, a discomfort that I, as the screenwriter, share.
But let me be very clear: I am a feminist. Jessica Hobbs, the director of Apple Tree Yard, is a feminist. Louise Doughty, who wrote the bestselling book on which the BBC1 drama was based, is a feminist. I take exception to the belittling apostrophes around the f-word in the headline – “This ‘feminist’ drama’s message? Woe betide the woman who strays” [a headline not written by Cooke]. Call me a bad feminist, but please don’t call me a “feminist”.
Cooke compares her unease at the response to Apple Tree Yard to watching Fatal Attraction in the 1980s, when audiences cheered as Glenn Close’s Medusa-permed marriage-wrecker was stabbed to death, after even Michael Douglas drowning her in the bath failed to see off her character’s demonic sexuality. To Cooke, the story of Apple Tree Yard enacts a similarly quease-inducing punishment on Emily Watson’s character, Yvonne Carmichael.
But Glenn Close’s character is not the protagonist of Fatal Attraction – that would be a different movie. Yvonne Carmichael is the protagonist of Apple Tree Yard and all drama “punishes” its protagonists. In the Fatal Attraction version of the story, the rape Yvonne suffers, rendered as graphically as possible, would have been the conclusion of the story, rather than the end of its first act. In Apple Tree Yard, the woe that betides Yvonne Carmichael arises not from her sexuality, but precisely from the misogynist conflation of this rape with her acting out a sexual fantasy.
The punishment she subsequently endures is determined not by us, the programme-makers, but by the inequalities of the legal system and its human instruments. Her ordeal may be biblical in its intensity, but it is entirely sociocultural in its enactment (and by the way – spoilers – legally speaking, Yvonne escapes punishment). Emily Watson’s wonderful face, harrowed by every emotion as she’s pilloried in court, is devastating, but hardly equivalent to Glenn Close’s mutilated corpse.
Quite rightly, Cooke notes the visual murkiness of Apple Tree Yard’s palate. As in film noir, it’s a moral murkiness; the piece is a thriller. But she omits the tranquil lightness and beauty of the “safe house” scenes with Yvonne’s lover, Mark Costley. Jessica Hobbs took her responsibilities for the images of Apple Tree Yard extremely seriously: her sparely deployed rendering of the rape was properly shocking, entirely without prurience and focused on the brutal consequences of the attack. It was emphatically not the contextless rape porn familiar from Game of Thrones et al. In contrast, the sex scenes, without a centimetre of nudity, to me struck a fine balance between the soft focus of Yvonne’s fantasy, the laughter that engenders intimacy and the bathetic realities of zips and Spanx. Yvonne is afforded some pleasure, though Rachel Cooke doesn’t buy it.
She declares this as the nub of her objection: where is the sexually empowering drama she was promised before the first episode? To her, the sexual game for Yvonne hasn’t been worth the candle: “Her obscure desire for [Costley] has seemed to me to be built on little more than her lack of self-esteem.” Well, yes, perhaps, though others might feel differently about the attractions of Ben Chaplin’s Costley… which, being the catalyst for the drama, was kind of our point.
Sexuality is complex and highly personal. Femaleness, like feminism, is a broad church. TV should be telling many stories about women and not everyone has to like them. But to suggest that in the process of bringing Apple Tree Yard to television screens, we didn’t consider all angles of the story we were telling is just plain wrong.
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