A Short Stay in Switzerland PT 1
Julie Walters has become a kind of brand – the best kind. Give her a role with any substance and you know she’ll deliver a Bafta-worthy performance and leave the audience damp-eyed. And so it proves here, in the moving true story of Bath doctor Anne Turner. Having watched her husband suffer a slow, undignified death, she was diagnosed with a similar neurological condition. “Rotten bad luck,” her character muses. Walters plays Turner as the best kind of frank, feisty, upper-middle-class mum. “Let battle commence,” she cries as she sets about taking on the illness she knows is incurable, but she soon decides she should be allowed to take her own life with dignity, even if UK law doesn’t allow “assisted dying”. It’s a decision her three grown-up children struggle to cope with. Sadly, their characters are short-changed by Frank McGuinness’s script; far better is Harriet Walter as a Christian friend with whom Turner has a searing confrontation over a last game of chess. It’s one of several shattering scenes in a drama that forces us to think hard about some big questions. ”Universal Music Group All Rights Reserved”