'Alias Grace': period drama speaks to current issues about predatory men

It's tempting to think of Alias Grace, the six-part historical drama now streaming on Netflix, as the next Handmaid's Tale. Both are wonderful adaptations of powerful novels by Margaret Atwood that address the position of women in patriarchal societies.

Atwood, incidentally, was hauled in as a supervising producer for both productions.

In a sense both are costume dramas. It is worth noting that in March this year the distinctive full-length red cloaks and white bonnets worn in the dystopian near future of The Handmaid's Tale were used by women in Texas in a powerful and silent protest against anti-abortion proposals there.

Those repressive bonnets turn up again in Alias Grace - it is part of the prison uniform worn by narrator and protagonist Grace Marks (brilliantly played by Sarah Gadon) - but here the symbolic motif is the patchwork quilt, like the one that Grace diligently stitches and works on as her story unfolds.

Quilts, we learn, are used to cover beds and, as Grace explains, "there are many dangerous things that take place in a bed". Quite how dangerous is made clear soon enough.

Atwood's novel was loosely based on the real-life murders in 1843 provincial Canada of wealthy landowner Thomas Kinnear and his mistress Nancy Montgomery. Grace, a young Irish immigrant who was employed by Kinnear, and a farmhand, James McDermott, were convicted of the killings. McDermott was hanged; Grace sentenced to life imprisonment.

Grace is a model prisoner. As such she has earned the privilege of doing housework in the prison governor's home. It is here that she comes to the attention of a young psychologist Dr Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft).

Grace is at first suspicious of Jordan. She had, after all, suffered appalling abuses at the hands of doctors and their staff in an asylum immediately after her conviction. But she comes to realise that Jordan is not "that sort of doctor".

Grace learns that Jordan has the power to recommend her for a pardon, and so she begins, rather like Scheherazade, to tell her story. She is, naturally, not a reliable witness, and her version of the truth emerges in a patchwork of harrowing flashbacks and her own complex thoughts. It makes for superb, literate entertainment.

WATCH | The trailer for Alias Grace

Holcroft is excellent as Jordan, the young doctor who slowly falls under the sway of Grace's narrative. He plays a convincing portrayal of a man torn between professional detachment and personal fascination.

But it is Gadon's show. She's extraordinary to watch and delivers an enigmatic performance, conveying so much in understatement.

Her life story does slowly emerge, but she is not very forthcoming about her ordeal in the asylum. "They took liberties, sir," is all she'll tell Jordan. Such quiet and unfussy language suggests a rigid 19th-century decorum that prevented women from speaking the truth, but its timeliness is thunderous; a code of silence will always protect predatory men, it seems.

At its quiet, furious heart, Alias Grace is all about role-playing - and the secret ways in which women tell unmentionable truths. It's the omissions in the story Grace tells as she works on her embroidery that compels her audience - Jordan and the viewer - to consider "things they don't print in the newspapers". All in all, this is suspenseful, superior television, a period drama with the urgency of the here and now.

• This article was originally published in The Times