There’s a scarcely believable discrepancy between the chilled, hirsute and blue-eyed Luke Treadaway who appears before me in shorts and T-shirt over Zoom from his parents’ house in Devon and the character he plays in his latest show. In The Singapore Grip, ITV’s big-budget costume drama for the autumn, the 35-year-old plays Matthew Webb, an uptight, bespectacled, sexually gauche 1940s colonial Brit. Impeccably outfitted in linen suit and panama hat, he’s everything Treadaway, after months of lockdown, is not.
In Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of JG Farrell’s satire (which takes its title from a sexual technique), we first see our hero crawling injured from the roadside, adjusting his specs after the Japanese have routed western forces, the very emblem of the out-gunned and out-thought Brit.
Then we cut to six months earlier, when colonial Britain is in its complacent pomp and Matthew has just arrived in Singapore from Blighty to bury his dad (an all-too-short appearance from Charles Dance). He’s also there to battle with his dad’s evil, grasping business partner Walter Blackett (a chilling performance of reptilian sliminess from David Morrissey) for their rubber firm.
“Hold on,” says Treadaway, running his fingers through his enviable locks, which clearly haven’t been tamed during quarantine. “Sexually gauche? I’m not sure that’s right.” Well , I point out, at a jazz dance Matthew finds himself on a veranda with two beautiful women, both striving to seduce him. He looks so uncomfortable his glasses seem poised to steam up. And he has just been on the dancefloor with spoiled Brit toff Joan who, at one point, pulls off her bra the better to seize Matthew’s attention, but he scarcely notices.
“Oh, I don’t think that’s fair,” says Treadaway. “I’m coming down with tropical flu when they attempt to seduce me. At the end of that scene, I pass out on the carpet. I’m not totally sexually gauche, just very ill.”
There is, I concede, much more to Matthew than mimsy, repressed Brit. “He’s the antithesis of the people he meets when he arrives in Singapore,” says the actor. “He is a vegetarian, an idealist, an internationalist. After going to an alternative public school in Suffolk, where he was taught that patriarchal differences in gender shouldn’t matter, he goes to Oxford, then works for the League of Nations. When he arrives to claim his inheritance, he is disgusted with how workers are exploited by the colonialists and at the racism his peers show for the locals.”
Indeed, Matthew is the prism through which we gain an insight into British imperialism and its baffling complacency, with disaster just around the corner. “And that,” says Treadaway, “is why the story is so resonant now. You don’t have to look far to see the exploitation of workers in a more or less racist way – and realise colonial attitudes persist.” He checks himself. “Not that I’m saying all Brits are awful. Matthew is an example of someone disgusted by his countrymen and trying to be a good person.”
The Singapore Grip was the third in Farrell’s trilogy about British colonialism, completed before his untimely death at the age of 44; he drowned in Bantry Bay, Ireland, in 1979. The first, Troubles, was set during the Irish war of independence. The second, The Siege of Krishnapur, dramatises the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and won the 1978 Booker prize. The final novel was set in early-1940s Singapore as British hubris unravelled – and this new dramatisation is the antidote to such conservative costume dramas as Downton Abbey or Victoria in which ITV seems to specialise. It goes where the national curriculum fears to tread, showing the racism and greed that underpinned the British empire.
“It is the very antithesis of Dunkirk,” says Treadaway. “We like our disasters, us Brits, don’t we? We imagine the best of us comes out in them. But The Singapore Grip shows Britain at its worst, which is the opposite of Dunkirk. We’re divided against ourselves and terrible in conflict.” He hopes the show will enlighten British people about the fall of Singapore, a nearly forgotten disaster. “Churchill said it was the ‘largest capitulation’ in British history. Yet most of us have forgotten it or never known about it, in part because it doesn’t fit with Britain’s self-image.”
Treadaway and the rest of the all-star cast, which includes Jane Horrocks and Colm Meaney, spent 10 weeks in Malaysia, filming in sets that recreated a British imperial Singapore that scarcely exists any more. “We filmed a lot in Penang and Kuala Lumpur, where there were old buildings that served as villas for the British colonial set. I remember they were near the botanical gardens in a kind of rural setting, but as we filmed I was really aware of the modern city thrumming away.”
He came to feel towards modern Malaysia the way he felt about Iceland when he was filming the Sky drama Fortitude there. In Fortitude, he played British scientist Vincent Rattrey, sent to an isolated Arctic town to research a disturbing outbreak of cannibalism among polar bears. “I came home just raving about these places. Their tourist boards should pay me really.”
Did working on The Singapore Grip make you proud or ashamed to be British? “Neither. I’ve never really been a patriot. If there was a patriotism for all of the people on this blue and green marble floating through space, I would be into that. Otherwise? Not really.” But, he suggests, let’s not overstate the politics. “There is also a love story at the heart of this drama. Love in the time of war is always compelling, isn’t it?”
At the start, when Matthew is caught in the attack, he has only one thought: to find the Chinese woman he loves and get out of the living hell that Singapore has become. This puts him out of step with another strand of British racism: sexual hypocrisy. Asian women are for sex, not marriage. A French expat tells Matthew that, in their concerns about the purity of the race, the British are like Hitler, a comparison not often made in a costume drama.
Treadaway is happy to talk about the role at length, in part because he has had little work since. “I was supposed to be doing a play in New York right now, but lockdown put paid to that.” He won’t tell me anything about it since he has hopes it may still be revived. So has lockdown been terrible for him? “Not at all! How can I complain when people are going hungry or losing their jobs? I’ve had a much easier time than most.” He spent most of it in London with his partner Ruta Gedmintas whom he met in 2011, on the set of the music-festival romance Tonight You’re Mine. “It’s been very peaceful. I’ve been able to recharge the batteries.”
Don’t you worry about the future of the theatre? It was on stage, after all, that Treadaway performed his most acclaimed role, as the teenage protagonist in the National Theatre adaption of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for which he won 2013’s best actor Olivier award. “I do – and I do think that the arts are everything that’s important for humans. But at the same time, how can I whine about theatre being underfunded when people are losing their homes and jobs?”
Instead of acting during lockdown, Treadaway has been making music with his twin brother Harry, also an actor. They played together in a four-piece band called Lizardsun when they were kids and starred, while still at drama school, as conjoined twins in the droll 2005 mock rockumentary Brothers of the Head. For the shoot, the pair had to be attached to each other for 15 hours, wearing sewn-together wetsuits.
Treadaway spent 10 years playing in largely ensemble casts – a posh comedy stoner in Attack the Block, a mythological cult leader in Clash of the Titans , a PoW in second world war drama Unbroken – before taking on a job even more challenging than being attached to his real-life brother for 15-hour stretches. In 2016, he starred in the adaptation of James Bowen’s bestselling memoir about begging and busking in London opposite a cat. In fact, in A Street Cat Named Bob, Treadaway starred opposite two ginger toms, since one was deemed not enough.
“You do a scene and think it’s come out really well,” Treadaway says. “But then they go, ‘No, the cat was looking grumpy.’ They have to use the takes that were good for Bob.” More challenging still, both the author and the eponymous cat were on set – monitoring Treadaway and the cats’ performances for authenticity.
One final question: what exactly is a Singapore grip? He giggles. There are lots of theories advanced in the drama, one involving a paper clip, and I have read that it’s a a slang phrase for a vaginal rippling technique used by sex workers. “Is it now?” says Treadaway evasively. Then he leans in close and whispers: “You’ll never find out from me.”
• The Singapore Grip starts on 13 September at 9pm on ITV.
