Sarah Phelps

Sarah Phelps is a British television screenwriter, radio writer, playwright and television producer. She is best known for her work on EastEnders, a number of BBC serial adaptations including Agatha Christie's The Witness For the Prosecution and And Then There Were None, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, J. K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy and work with the Royal Shakespeare Company. 2Career Phelps has written over 50 episodes of EastEnders, including the return of Den Watts and his final demise, less than two years later, when he was killed by his wife, Chrissie.ap Award at the Commission for Racial Equality's Race in the Media Awards (RIMA). She wrote the screenplay for the BBC's 2011 Christmas costume drama adaptation Great Expectations and the World War One drama series The Crimson Field. The show was cancelled after one series due to middling ratings.In 2015, a television adaptation of J. K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy was written by Phelps. 3Christie Adaptations In the same year, her adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None was broadcast.Reviewing the latter for The Daily Telegraph, Tim Martin found that, "The final episode of this bloody adaptation by Sarah Phelps did splendid justice to Christie's lightless universe, presenting an isolated mansion full of leaking corpses, in which the characters – quite understandably – freaked out in ways that no previous adaptation has countenanced." Martin went on to note, "All this couldn't have been further from the teasing restraint of classic adaptations such as René Clair's celebrated Hollywood version from 1945. But Phelps's version felt closer both to the cruelty of Christie's original and to its dramatic intentions. Clair chose to sacrifice the book's murder-suicide conclusion in favour of a romantic clinch, while Christie herself had already ditched it for her stage adaptation in 1943. Phelps kept it in, and this brave decision allowed her adaptation to preserve its cheerless emotional contract with the viewer ... [C]lassily photographed in low light, moonlight and candlelight, and with strong performances from the weighty ensemble cast throughout, it made a strong case for Phelps (best known for her TV adaptations of Oliver Twist and Great Expectations) to be put on seasonal murder duty at the BBC every year."In April 2018, another of Agatha Christie's novels adapted by Phelps was broadcast on BBC On