Two years after making the Oscar and Golden Globe nominated Dickens adaptation of LITTLE DORRIT, Christine Edzard reteams with Derek Jacobi and Cyril Cusack to bring us THE FOOL, a costume drama/satire about financial skull-duggery, and confidence tricksters in both the upper and lower classes in Victorian London, in which a llowly theater clerk poses as a member of Victorian England’s wealthy upper crust as part of a financial scam.
In the London of 1857 an obscure clerk moves freely between the world of the poor and the world of the rich and privileged. On the one hand he is the knocked-about minion in a large theatre, at ease among the bartering and haggling in the second-hand shops where he was brought up; on the other he is a shrewd man of the world, a bold speculator, manipulating the foolishness, gullibility and greed of those around him. Each world is poles apart from the other, yet in the end the two worlds meet, and in the most unexpected of ways.
Helmer and co-scripter Edzard shows off her research and topnotch design with street characters based on interviews by 19th- century social journalist Henry Mayhew. – Variety
Starring Derek Jacobi, Miranda Richardson, Miriam Margolyes, Joan Sims, Graham Fletcher-Cook.