Part 1

By Charles Dickens

Kate Dickens tells the story of her father’s final and unfinished novel, a fast-moving thriller set in the cathedral town of Cloisterham.

Edwin visits his fiancé Rosa at Miss Twinkleton’s Academy, but his gift of a pair of gloves for every one of her nineteen years is not as successful as he had hoped. In an opium den near London’s docks, Princess Puffer teases secrets from Edwin’s uncle, John Jasper.

Kate Dickens… Pippa Nixon
John Jasper… Joel McCormack
Edwin Drood … Iwan Davies
Rosa Bud … Isabella Inchbald
Princess Puffer… Rachel Atkins

Adapted by Mike Walker
Directed by Jeremy Mortimer
A BBC Cymru Wales Production

It is Christmas in Cloisterham. All is fine until Edwin, the young man who appears to have it all, a beautiful and charming prospective bride, the promise of an engineering job in Egypt, disappears. Presumed murdered. Could it have been impetuous Neville Landless ? Or Edwin’s uncle Jasper ?

Dickens’ last, unfinished, novel is set in a phantasmagoria drug fuelled landscape where nobody is who or what they say they are and motives are more tangled than the streets and alleys of the city of Cloisterham where the action is played out. Drood is an impressionistic and fast moving thriller and a study of guilt in an edgy, and unpredictable landscape. Whilst he was writing it, Dickens was driving himself towards exhaustion and death through his obsessive public performances of the most lurid parts of Oliver Twist. He is revisiting his first successful novel as he is struggling with his last, fearful that his creative well is drying up and that he will never bring this story to a close - and struggling with a hidden guilt of his own.

Mike Walker’s dramatization is narrated by Dickens’ daughter Kate, witness to her father’s final weeks, and whose fascination with The Mystery of Edwin Drood leads her to look into its unsolved conclusion to find clues about her father’s character.

Pippa Nixon (Unforgotten ITV) plays Kate Dickens. Peter Davison (Life, Gentleman Jack BBC) plays Hiram Grewgious. Joel MacCormack (Safe House 2 ITV) is John Jasper. Damian Lynch (Giri/Haji BBC/ Netflix) is the Reverend Crisparkle. Rachel Atkins (Doctors, Call the Midwife, Chernobyl) plays Princess Puffer. Maanuv Thiara (Brassic, Line of Duty) plays Neville Landless. Halema Hussain (SuperNova BBC Films) plays Helena Landlesss. Iwan Davies, who plays Edwin, graduated from RADA in 2019.

Show less