The Sixth Commandment ★★★★
Wednesday (September 4) SBS, 9.25pm
“I want us to consider the commandments,” says Ben Field (Eanna Hardwicke) in the short, unsettlingly calm narration over the opening shots of The Sixth Commandment.
Timothy Spall in The Sixth Commandment: He breathes life into the conflicted duality of Peter Farquhar.Credit: Amanda Searle
They’re shots of rural serenity, still fields and country roads with no people, just a black cat appearing like a portent of doom. Like the voiceover, the countryside is peaceful and tranquil, but carrying menace in its emptiness, its coldness.
It is the opening to a show about emptiness: the emptiness of a human soul longing for love, and the emptiness left behind when the darkness of human nature steals life and joy from the world.
The Sixth Commandment is based on a true story, the story of Ben Field, a brilliant and charismatic student, and Peter Farquhar, a passionate and inspirational teacher and author.
Farquhar was the kind of teacher about whom former students wax lyrical, whose ability to connect with young people and devotion to lifting them up through education made him beloved by generations of pupils.
But he was also a man who struggled to reconcile his devout Christianity with his homosexuality, and lived a lonely life, yearning for love and companionship. In Field he thought he had found it: the two men, widely separated in age, formed a close relationship, that Farquhar believed was the love of his life.
He was tragically deceived. Field was a cold-blooded, mercenary killer, given to cruelty and out only for personal gain. Worming into his teacher’s affections with pronouncements of his own religious fervour and understanding of literature, Field’s intelligence and charm won Farquhar over and spelled his dreadful doom.