“Dickensian” barely covers the conditions in which trafficked children found themselves in this important drama
Stolen
Sunday, BBC One
Stolen would have made Dickens weep. Getting on for two centuries after Oliver Twist, children are being stolen and set to work in Britain in conditions that the adjective Dickensian barely covers. In Stephen Butchard’s important drama, shown, to the BBC’s credit, on its main channel, an Eastern European boy arrives in Manchester. Delighted by the sheer fact of England, he bounces down the streets, wishing passers-by “Good morning” before being marched into a flophouse where illegal workers sleep on the floor. Its owner tells Georgie (played by Inokentijs Vitkevics with a naive bravado) that he is being given the opportunity to earn real money as its cleaner. Unpaid at the end of the week, he takes revenge by slipping a sliver of plastic into a sandwich. The brutish gangmaster throws him on to the streets, where Georgie’s Anglophilia sours into insolence. A youth casually knifes him in the stomach.
Advertisement
Elsewhere in Manchester, an African girl, Rosemary, flushes her passport down an airport lavatory. Placed in a safe house, she escapes to be sold to work as a supermarket owner’s domestic slave, although she fails to meet his wife’s standards and is returned. A Vietnamese boy has been smuggled here in a lorry and finds himself working in a cannabis factory in a suburban home. In one of the few moments of comic relief, his fellow captive becomes so claustrophobic that he smashes his way out through the roof.
The director, Justin Chadwick, who favoured flashy buildings and bare-walled interiors, as if to highlight the contrast between the surface of modern Manchester and what lies beneath, made much use, perhaps too much, of split screens to link these stories. But our through path was the detective Anthony Carter, whose attitude to these enormities veered between moral outrage and pragmatism. He had feelings particularly for Rosemary, for he had a daughter of the same age. The Carters had recently moved to Manchester and Ellie was starting a new school. Even a privileged childhood contains its anxieties. But the film ended not redemptively with Rosemary at school, although she is placed in one, but with another African child walking through a terminal, presumably to similar terrors.
Butchard used gentle imagery to reinforce his points. Ellie and Rosemary played with dolls together. Rosemary rearranged fish fingers into a human shape. While she believed that she maintained free will, she was being as casually manipulated. Stolen was enhanced by the naturalism of its unfamiliar cast, amid which Damian Lewis, braving a Phil Davis accent, looked conspicuous. The speeches by the trafficker Ekoku, a scary Nonso Anozie, in which he pretended a moral equivalence with Carter (“All you care about is yourself and your family”) and blamed the Western demand for slaves, lacked more credibility than maybe was intended. But this was an admirable drama and, while it hardly sung off the screen as Dickens’s novels sung off the page, it wasn’t for a minute dull.