Getting away with it
In Welsh drama Cleddau (The One That Got Away), Elen Rhys and Richard Harrington play a pair of detectives – and former lovers – brought back together to solve the riddle behind a string of murders. They talk about the love story at the centre of the series and the challenge of filming versions in English and Welsh.
On the face of it, Welsh drama Cleddau (English title The One That Got Away) has all the hallmarks of a classic crime thriller. When a young nurse is found murdered in a secluded forest, a close-knit, small-town community is put on edge as a historic conviction is thrown into doubt, raising the horrifying prospect of a copycat killer.
Yet the Welsh-language series is more than a traditional whodunnit, with writer Catherine Tregenna (Law & Order: UK) putting the personal before the professional to turn the six-part series into a forensic love story.
Elen Rhys (The Mallorca Files) stars as DI Ffion Lloyd, who is recruited to find the killer alongside DS Rick Walters (Hinterland’s Richard Harrington), her former lover whom she last spoke to a decade earlier. Since then, he has married and had children, but as soon as they are reunited, it’s clear their relationship is one cold case that hasn’t been fully resolved.
After three seasons of The Mallorca Files, in which she plays a British detective who partners with a German cop to solve crimes on the titular Spanish island, Rhys returned home to Wales for her first leading role in a Welsh-language series with Cleddau.
“Cath’s written some really great scripts, and when I first read them, I really enjoyed that,” she tells DQ at the Bafta Cymru premiere of the series.
Meanwhile, Harrington is synonymous with Welsh drama after starring in Y Gwyll (Hinterland), the show that first put Welsh-language series on the international stage. He had previously worked with Tregenna on her stage play Art & Guff in 2001, a project he says changed his life in terms of raising his profile as an actor.
“And I love playing in the worlds she creates,” he says. “I’d been offered another detective a couple of years ago and I didn’t want to do another one [after Hinterland]. But I didn’t see Rick as a detective. He’s much more colourful, much more well rounded, and it’s a love story between two people. That’s probably reflected in my performance sometimes. I don’t really care about the police stuff, to be honest.”
“They’re not defined by their roles,” says Rhys. Harrington adds: “That’s what makes this different. And that’s what drew me to it. It’s a cop show; it does everything it says on the tin but, when you open the tin, the ingredients are slightly different. You come up with a different version because it’s not about reinventing the wheel. The genre works; it’s how you represent that genre and tell quite a beguiling love story.”
From the moment they are reunited after Ffion is brought back to the community she left behind following her split from Rick, the chemistry between the pair is clear, raising the prospect that neither has entirely left behind their feelings for the other. Then as the series progresses, they are forced to confront their relationship while dealing with the fallout from the murder that opens the series.
Tregenna’s skill is that it’s not clear where the boundary between crime drama and love story is drawn. “I think it’s equally both,” Rhys says. “It needs to have the crime element. But also, the world is rich, the characters are rich. All of the characters are well rounded and they all have really ugly elements to them, which I think works. The two heroes, the protagonists, they’re not very nice people at times.”
“Ultimately, it’s about forgiveness in lots of ways,” Harrington says. “You can empathise with everyone in it. And it’s not just about losing a relationship or losing a case; it’s also about losing a father who’s got Alzheimer’s [in the case of Ffion]. The memory of everything is withering away.”
Rhys describes what happened between Ffion and Rick as “complex,” whether their split resulted from a betrayal, a rift or something else. “Then they have been forced back to work with each other when they haven’t dealt with any of this stuff in the past, and then they’re realising that maybe there’s something still there between them, alongside the pressure of the working environment where everything they thought was true is crumbling away,” she says. “It’s just bringing everything from all angles to the surface, and they’re having to really work through some stuff together that neither of them really wants to take a look at.”
“It’s also predominantly about a case that we thought was dead and buried,” Harrington adds. “It’s the thing that brought us together, made us great, and it’s the thing that separated us. Ffion’s gone to work in another city and I’ve [Rick’s] stayed in this place where this huge tragedy took place. I’ve lived with the scars of the town and it looks as if this thing is happening again and perhaps we didn’t get it right the first time. The reason they’re thrown together, because they’re the perfect match, is they’re the ones who seemingly put it to bed 10 years earlier. It’s forensic in terms of relationships and in terms of the genre.”
Taking its title from the river close to where the series is set in Pembrokeshire, Cleddau also stands apart from Hinterland and other Welsh noirs due to the fact that there is less emphasis on the surrounding landscape, which Harrington says isn’t really a character in the show.
“When I first read the script, that’s where I thought it was heading,” Rhys says of the drama’s tone. “But it’s a bit more real than that. It’s really cinematic and there are some beautiful shots in this, but I don’t think it was ever set out to be that. It was set out to be something more real.”
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Produced by Blacklight Television for Welsh broadcaster S4C and directed by Sion Ifan (The Secret), the series began shooting last November and concluded in April. And with Welsh- and English-language versions made back to back, Harrington likens the process to filming two shows at once.
“It’s a very intense environment to work in and there’s no time. It’s amazing what we did in the time we had,” he says. “The schedule for the English alone was a lot. To be able to couple it up with a language which is relatively alien to me now is very, very, very hard. But they made it. She [Rhys] is great.”
“We essentially do 12 episodes rather than six, and the budget and the schedule does not really allow for that,” Rhys notes. “I knew it would be difficult. I’ve never done a lead role in Welsh, let alone with the procedural stuff. It’s a mouthful in English, but at least I’m familiar with the terminology. Whereas the Welsh stuff, I didn’t know a lot of the words, let alone making them sound realistic and like you know what you’re talking about.”
The actor also found back-to-back production didn’t allow time for her and Harrington to play on set and try different things with their performances. “You try to go for nuance and audition new ideas in the scene, but all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Right, we’ve got to just do it again in the Welsh language.’ Not only does that take away from how rich the work can be sometimes, but it was about the stamina and energy you need to flip to a different language. I underestimated it in that way.
“When you speak Welsh, you can’t just go, ‘Now we’re doing it in English,’ and then do exactly the same. The rhythm’s different, the energy’s different. It sits in your body differently, I think. When I speak Welsh, my voice is different. You connect emotionally differently.”
“I’d done it before and I buried my head in the sand about it,” admits Harrington, who describes the Welsh version of Cleddau as “more melodramatic” than the English one. “The last time I did it [on Hinterland], we had a lot more time. It was nine months for the first season, 11 for the second. But also the dialogue was quite sparse in that, whereas in this it’s quite dense because it’s very character-driven.
“But it’s got to be more interesting than the novelty of it just being in two languages. The reason that was done was because they wanted to make something that would work internationally, and they could only get a certain amount of money from the Welsh channel.”
Hinterland became a trailblazer for Welsh-language drama when it aired on BBC Four and landed numerous international deals, and Harrington knows first-hand how far the show has travelled around the world.
“On the first day of the shoot, the first words that came out of my mouth were in Welsh. We were in a tiny little garage in Aberystwyth, and I don’t think anybody thought it was going to do anything,” he remembers. “Then there I was in California, broken down on the Pacific Coast Highway in a camper van, and the first person to turn up to help me said, ‘Oh my God, you were in Hinterland.’
“I just thought that was a bit surreal. It was able to travel and do well in parts of America that were relatively isolated. I doubt it would have had the same impact in New York as places in America where the next town is miles away or the geology of the place is hard to move around. People got it.”
“It’s definitely changed Welsh telly,” says Rhys. “People are a lot more open to watching something in the Welsh language with subtitles because of Hinterland.”
Distributor Banijay Rights will be hoping Cleddau can have the same impact, in any language, as S4C prepares to launch the series this Sunday. It will also be available across the UK on BBC iPlayer.
“The writing’s great. Elen is a terrific lead, and the director was relatively new. He’d been an actor and he carried the weight of all of us, and I think it deserves its place because it was made on a shoestring,” Harrington says. “That shouldn’t be the way forward for things like this, but it just proves what can be done with a bit of love and muscle and hurt. Those ingredients are vital when you’re making something with passion.”
tagged in: Banijay Rights, BlackLight Television, Cleddau, Elen Rhys, Richard Harrington, S4C, The One That Got Away