Mike Bartlett came to television from the stage and brought its habits with him: one small domestic wound, a plot that tightens every hour, and no comfort at the end. Doctor Foster is the proof, and it is better acted than it is plotted.
Fi1m perspective
A blonde hair on a scarf. That is the whole of the first episode of Doctor Foster (2015), and Mike Bartlett gets five hours of television out of it. It is his habit: take one ordinary thing and hand it to a woman cleverer than the people around her, then let her pull at it until the house comes down. Gemma Foster is a GP, and Suranne Jones plays her suspicion as a clinical procedure, symptom by symptom, which is where the series gets most of its force. Bartlett writes women of every age with more than one dimension, and he writes them the trouble rather than the reaction to it.
He began at the Royal Court with My Child (2007), then went to the National Theatre for Earthquakes in London (2010) and 13 (2011), large plays that put a family's quarrel and a whole city's crisis on the same stage. Cock (2009) was smaller and stranger. Television came with The Town (2012) for ITV, then Doctor Foster, which grew out of an adaptation of Medea, and that is the key to him. He likes the old forms, Greek tragedy especially, and he drops them into a modern kitchen without softening them. Since then there has been a Doctor Who episode, Knock Knock (2017), Press (2018), Trauma (2018), Life (2020) and King Charles III (2014), a play about a king not yet crowned, which later went to the screen. Rupert Goold and Clare Lizzimore have each directed his work more than once.
The Greek habit is his strength. Nobody in Doctor Foster is let off, least of all Gemma, and the series declines to tell us whom to side with. We spent five evenings tighter in the shoulders than a programme about a marriage in a large light house had any right to make us, and by the end we were faintly ashamed of how much we had enjoyed the demolition. The reason is that Gemma knows exactly where the joints are, and Bartlett lets her use that knowledge. Ben Wheeler's bright, shadowless daylight suits him too: his people can see everything in their lives and still cannot tell what is true.
The weakness is the machinery. Bartlett's plots are less careful than his heroines, and the town in Doctor Foster is smaller than any town, so that the right person is always in the right café at the right minute. Tom Vaughan directs fast enough that the questions do not catch up until the credits, which is a kindness to the script and a small cheat on the viewer.
Bartlett has said he loves "those moments when there's a big drama or a TV show everyone is talking about, because it feels like we have got a community." He has made one. Start with Doctor Foster, and watch it with someone whose loyalty you are sure of.
Biography
Mike Bartlett is an English playwright and screenwriter. Born on 7 October 1980 in Oxford, he began writing for the stage with his first professional play Not Talking (2006) and his debut production My Child at the Royal Court Theatre in 2007. He later served as writer-in-residence at the National Theatre.
Bartlett is best known for his television series Doctor Foster (2015–), which he created and wrote, and for writing the Doctor Who episode "Knock Knock" (2017). His stage plays include King Charles III (2014), which won the Olivier Award for Best New Play and was adapted for television in 2017. Other notable works encompass Cock, Bull and Love Love Love.
