Prisoner 951 review – this defiant Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe drama makes Britain look ridiculous

“My name is Nazanin. I do not know why I am here.” “Everyone says that.” As Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe enters an Iranian prison for the first time and introduces herself to a fellow inmate, you feel the sudden chill, deep in her bones. She knows the Iranian regime has no grounds to be holding her. But straight away, she has learned that that doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, back home in London, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, is cheerfully preparing their flat for her return – flowers on the kitchen table, favourite ice-cream in the freezer – blissfully unaware that he won’t see his wife for almost six years. This four-part drama – adapted by Stephen Butchard from the couple’s forthcoming book A Yard of Sky – attempts a difficult task. The horror that engulfed this family between 2016 and 2022 was both brutal and infuriatingly banal. In Iran, Nazanin was confronted with a Kafkaesque nightmare at the hands of an unaccountable theocracy. Without knowing it, she wasn’t a prisoner as much as a hostage; a victim of forces set in motion before she was born. Meanwhile, in London, Richard faced a British government in constant flux, that was scrolling, post-Brexit, through a hopeless series of ministers, seemingly distracted by the chaos and immobilised by the gravity of what faced them. Representing the human trauma at the heart of this perfect, deadly storm is a challenge. Butchard’s script makes the best of snatched, long-distance conversations between Nazanin, Richard and their infant daughter Gabriella, the blankness of her captors, the casual harshness of her (female) guards and the bewilderment of the British diplomats attempting to engage with the case. Its success rests upon communicating a sense of the couple’s tormented internality during this period. Joseph Fiennes as Richard is a study in quiet, racked anguish. Fiennes does an excellent job of portraying the small changes in his demeanour as months turn into years – he becomes sadder but also quicker to anger, resolute but increasingly prone to despair. He shaves less. He sleeps more. Narges Rashidi, meanwhile, is a revelation as Nazanin – a woman forced to live at the midpoint between defiance and defeat; watching her life, and the childhood of her daughter, slip through her fingers. Montages and dream sequences are put to work as the couple try to bridge the physical distance between them. Inevitably, there are longueurs in any drama of this nature – one of the cruellest aspects of this ordeal was surely the sense of wheelspinning frustration as, in both Britain and Iran, diplomacy moved at a glacial pace. Accordingly, this is less a thriller and more a meditation on powerlessness – how do you maintain hope when the world seems oblivious to your plight? Related: ‘She was extremely petrified’: the shocking drama about one woman’s six-year ordeal in an Iranian jail There is also a sense of simmering anger as a possible/likely (delete depending on how seriously you take denials by the UK government) reason for Nazanin’s detention becomes clear in the shape of a multimillion pound arms debt owed by Britain to Iran since the early 1970s. The government has never acknowledged this as a factor – although, in what was clearly simply a bizarre coincidence, the debt was paid on the day Nazanin was released. There’s a darkly comic scene in which Ratcliffe communicates his desperation while Liz Truss gazes blankly at him Throughout the drama, the status of Britain as a deeply unserious country during this period is reinforced. In a series that understandably isn’t exactly overflowing with light relief, it’s (almost, but very quickly not) a blessing when Boris Johnson turns up on the television in Nazanin’s prison. “How can this man be important?” says one of her fellow inmates incredulously. “He looks like he’s fallen out of a bush.” Of course, Johnson’s role in Nazanin’s continuing incarceration was particularly egregious: by carelessly stating in parliament in 2017 that she was “simply teaching people journalism”, he contradicted the accurate version of events she had given to the Iranian authorities. We watch this incident from Nazanin’s point of view and this prison perspective viscerally emphasises the extent to which Johnson endangered more than just her freedom. Richard, meanwhile, has the privilege of dealing with the then foreign secretary Liz Truss towards the end of Nazanin’s confinement – there’s a darkly comic scene in which Ratcliffe communicates his desperation while Truss gazes blankly at him like a child being shown a confusing card trick. Prisoner 951 arrives at a precarious moment – when political forces in the UK seem to frown upon crosscultural liaisons and care little about potentially dividing families. While this drama is powered by anger, it’s probably best understood as a defiant love story. Even as the cynical, eventually petty affairs of international relations threatened to destroy the tiny, happy world that Nazanin and Richard had built, this extended, multinational, multi-ethnic family – as devoted to each other in Tehran as they were in London – never stopped reminding each other why they couldn’t allow that to happen. Nazanin might not have known why she was in prison. But she knew why she needed to get out. And that’s as good a riposte to our current malaise as it’s possible to imagine. • Prisoner 951 aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now