David Farr writes spy television as a series of conversations between clever people deciding how much to tell each other. It is a pleasant thing to watch and he does it well; what he has not yet managed is to leave us unsure whom to believe.
Fi1m perspective
The scene David Farr writes best has two people at a table, each working out how much the other knows. In The Night Manager (2016) it is Tom Hiddleston's hotel manager and Hugh Laurie's arms dealer, and the pleasure of the series is almost entirely in watching them size each other up. Farr came to television from the theatre, where he was an associate director at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it shows in how far he trusts a room and two good actors to carry an hour. When the scene is that one, he is hard to beat.
He learned the trade on Spooks, writing for it from its fourth series to its ninth, and has said himself that it was training. His first feature credit was Hanna (2011), which he co-wrote and later rebuilt as a series of his own in 2019, with more room for its heroine and its politics than the film had. In between came The Ones Below (2016), a Hitchcock-flavoured thriller about new parents and trust that he wrote and directed, and, the same year, The Night Manager, which is the reason most people know his name. Since then there have been McMafia, Troy: Fall of a City and The Midwich Cuckoos (2022), and a second run of The Night Manager is under way. It is a career built almost entirely on other people's books.
His method, in his own words, is to "strip the book back to find the skeleton" and then reclothe it, and the reclothing is plainly the part he enjoys. He moved le Carré's story forward to the Arab Spring, and the update was clean enough that most critics took it as the series' main achievement. We were less sure. Susanne Bier directed with confidence, but the skeleton Farr found was simpler than the one le Carré buried. The supporting characters never acquire weight of their own, and once we could see what each was for, we could see where the plot was going. Some critics have said the result is closer to Bond than to le Carré, and on that point they are right.
We enjoyed it more than the writing earned, and we knew it while it was happening. Early on we had decided whom to trust, and we kept watching anyway, for Hiddleston and Laurie and for the actors around them, who kept suggesting more complicated people than the script had written. That is Farr's position on the evidence so far: a careful builder who chooses good books, works with good directors and leaves the hard part to the cast. The second series of The Night Manager will tell us whether he has learned to keep us guessing. We would like to be surprised.
Biography
David Farr (born 29 October 1969) is a British writer and theatrical director. He was brought up in Surrey and educated at the University of Cambridge, where he read English Literature. He began directing theatre at university and later served as Artistic Director of the Bristol Old Vic from 2002 to 2005 and the Lyric Hammersmith from 2005 to 2009. In 2009 he became Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Farr has written regularly for television, including episodes of Spooks. His screen credits include the film Hanna (2011), which he co-wrote, and its television adaptation (2019), for which he also directed episodes. He adapted John le Carré’s novel for the BBC series The Night Manager (2016). Other work includes the feature The Ones Below (2015), which he wrote and directed, and the series The Midwich Cuckoos (2022). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2025.
