Helen Rosshalde

Helen Rosshalde is an English woman married into wealth and comfort in Hamburg, the wife of a businessman whose fortune rests on the heroin trade she has chosen not to examine too closely. She moves through elegant rooms with practised composure, protecting a life built on money she understands better than she admits.

Lindsay Duncan plays complicity as a kind of good manners, letting Helen's poise curdle slowly as the world she has agreed not to see starts pressing in on her. The performance never asks for sympathy or judgment outright; it just lets you watch a clever woman calculate, in real time, what she is actually willing to know.