Jasper Rees

There are plenty of bits of hits, but missing is the play’s probing examination of quite why Mozart is so new and astonishing.

The three excellent main performances are stronger than the writing: like good sculptors McClure, Best and Marshal use their skill to carve depths into shallow matter.

There are signs of a right old food-fight in script meetings as a result of which facts have been tossed aside or massaged into a fantastical soufflé. That Carême worked for Talleyrand (Jérémie Renier) is the drama’s core ingredient.

We must wait until midway into the second episode of three to find whose death is to be solved. Only then does the story work its evidential way back towards the point zero of motive. Thus this Christie feels like a long skip to the centre of an impeccably clipped maze, followed by a long trudge to the exit.

It’s brutal, at times overwrought. But in the end, yes, there is a powerful and moving redemption that feels beautiful and true.

Its inventive mockery is exhaustingly funny. A minor downside is that one or two jokes – mainly about our souls and other nethers – grow repetitious. But its audacity is always pushing boundaries.

Deeply moving in its strongest moments, this is a dispiriting, knotty, elusive story about absence of closure and the tragic denial of redemption.

It’s good, competent meat-and-two-veg noir. Some acting on the undercard is a bit teaky, but there are flavoursome cameos.

This new series, casting Worsley as an inky-fingered sleuth shedding new light on well-worn episodes in British history, could run and run.

It’s never worthy or dull. The most powerful scene finds the couple at an excruciating open day in which prospective adopters compete for potential matches. .... What is less so is the gratuitous swing of an axe that concludes the middle episode of three, yanking the plot in a random new direction. The final episode is certainly moving.