![]() Their presence is irritating, however, to Verloc’s Russian supervisor, who instructs him to set off a bomb at the Royal Observatory that will be blamed on the anarchists and alarm the British government into taking action against them. The recently ubiquitous Toby Jones (“Wayward Pines,” “Detectorists”) plays Verloc, the proprietor of a seedy London naughty-goods store, who is a kind of down-market double agent - he works as a spy for Russia, but the targets of his spying are a group of hapless anarchists unlikely to cause any real trouble. This goes along with a general literalness and glumness - little of the satire and humor of the novel has seeped into the mini-series. The screenwriter, Tony Marchant, keeps the main incidents of Conrad’s plot but lays them out chronologically, losing the revelations and shadings of the novel’s flashbacks and flash-forwards. What this “Masterpiece Theater”-style presentation has to say about contemporary terrorism is less clear. ![]() And the current version, a three-part mini-series beginning online at AcornTV on Monday, arrives at a time when terror attacks, real and imagined, are a fundamental issue around the world. Version 3 was shown in 1992, a year after the Irish Republican Army carried out a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street, the residence of the British prime minister. That probably says less about Conrad than it does about the continuing relevance of terrorism as a subject for fictional examination. The BBC can’t seem to leave “The Secret Agent” alone - it’s commissioned four adaptations of Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel about the social and psychological underpinnings of a bomb attack.
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