Still More Stephen Poliakoff

Capturing Mary – Monday 12 November at 9pm on BBC Two

In Capturing Mary, writer-director Stephen Poliakoff enters new territory by creating a terrifying and compulsive story of lost youth.

Capturing Mary opens as Maggie Smith who plays the older Mary, knocks unannounced on the door of a grand old house in central London. Coaxed across the threshold by its teenage concierge, Joe (Danny Lee Wynter), she enters and hesitantly relives her past.

When Mary retraces her footsteps through the corridors of the splendid mansion, where as a brilliant young writer and critic (played in her earlier incarnation by Ruth Wilson) she attended glamorous Fifties soirees, she recounts to the sympathetic Joe the story of her youth.

Looking back on her heyday, the once highly successful Mary recollects the salons at the elegant house when she used to rub shoulders with the cultural elite. She reveals to Joe that she is haunted by the memory of a deeply sinister man called Greville (David Walliams), whom she met at one of these gatherings.

A social climber who rose without trace, Greville had tentacles that seemed to reach into the highest echelons of society. Mary remembers him as an ostensibly supremely charming, but in fact subtly evil, man.

He feigned friendship with Mary but, when she spurned him, he ruthlessly brought about her destruction. Capturing Mary is a dark and frightening account of the past and how it can capture and destroy a person's life.