Olivia Colman’s performance as Miss Havisham in the BBC’s latest adaptation of Great Expectations has been hailed as one of her finest. When the scriptwriter Stephen Knight knew she had agreed to play the role of the malevolent jilted lover, he revised her lines to suit her personality, thereby enhancing the part. Miss Havisham is a gift for any dramatist, actor or costume designer: a brooding, grotesque, sinister evocation of sublimated revenge, of the emotionally dead who can still wreak havoc on the living.
Nor is Colman the only celebrity in this macho version of one of the most memorable Victorian novels ever written. To name only a few of the star-studded cast, Pip, the sweet-natured orphan is played by Fionn Whitehead, of Dunkirk and Black Mirror; Matt Berry, from Toast of London, is Mr Pumblechook and Shalom Brune-Franklin, from The Tourist and Line of Duty, plays the heart-breaking Estella.
Nobody could argue that Great Expectations is among Dickens’s most powerful works. In part inspired by the Kentish marshes near where Dickens bought a house, the significance of its wild setting led one critic to describe it as the author’s Wuthering Heights. Written in serial form to save the fortunes of his failing magazine, All the Year Round, it was a sensation on publication (December 1, 1860- August 3, 1861). To this day – as the BBC’s new version attests – it continues to be enormously popular.
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Too popular, you might say. Colman’s Miss Havisham is only the latest in a long line of distinguished performances, having previously been acted by Helena Bonham Carter, Charlotte Rampling and Gillian Anderson. As one reviewer commented, Havisham has become, for the mature woman, the equivalent of King Lear for men.
Great Expectations is beginning to feel like a Christmas pantomime: gone for a short while before returning to our screens yet again, as if on a relentless seasonal cycle. At the most recent count, there have been about 18 adaptations. Some would argue that none has ever surpassed that by David Lean in 1946, whose melodramatic black and white version, with John Mills, Jean Simmons and Alex Guinness, was mesmerising.
In BBC trailers, this new version is puffed as coming “from the writer of Peaky Blinders”. Dickens doesn’t even get a mention. Is this a crass oversight? More likely it’s a misguided assumption that everyone hearing the title already knows who wrote the original book.
There’s no denying what a great novel it is; I’ve lost count of how often I’ve read it. Yet you can’t help wondering what makes commissioning editors turn to it time after time when there are so many other brilliant titles to choose from. What does it have that other classic novels lack in terms of dramatic potential and contemporary relevance?
The answer, probably, is familiarity. Great Expectations has become a stalwart of the BBC’s repertory, like Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The central story is as well known, to many, as their own date of birth but, like Macbeth or Othello or Richard III, it can be staged in countless innovative ways to appeal to modern tastes and interests. Perhaps editors turn to it again and again because they know it will always attract an audience. Yet surely they must by now have an inkling that it’s growing as stale as old clothes in a dressing-up box.
A trailer for David Lean’s film describes Dickens as the greatest storyteller ever, and asks “Who could paint more vigorously than Dickens in the broad colours of melodrama?” That, presumably, is the commissioning editors’ defence. I would suggest, however, that there are many others who fit the Victoriana bill yet are all too often overlooked.
Where better to start than the woefully-neglected George Gissing, who was described by George Orwell as “perhaps the best novelist England has produced”? Coming from very humble origins, and inspired by Dickens as a child, he went on to write several novels whose predominant theme was poverty. The Odd Women, Demos, but especially New Grub Street – about the trials of making a living as a literary hack – could be adapted for the screen, bringing the late Victorian era into our own times from a wholly fresh angle.
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Another contender is Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset, which I’ve recently read. While earlier novels in this series have been often adapted – never more memorably than The Barchester Chronicles, featuring Alan Rickman as Obadiah Slope, which can now be seen as a rehearsal for his Professor Snape – this less well-known novel is packed with drama and emotion: thwarted love, marital misery, financial skulduggery and ruin, snobbery and corruption, with at its heart the criminal prosecution of a good man accused of theft, which he cannot remember if he committed or not. Adapt that, and viewers would be enthralled as the labyrinthine tale holds them in suspense, and Trollope’s comic cameos lighten the sometimes heart-rending plot. But if this doesn’t appeal, there are dozens of others by Trollope to choose from.
John Galt died shortly after Victoria came to the throne, but his portraits of early 19th-century Scotland are small gems of character and situation. I have only read a handful, of which Annals of the Parish is my favourite, but since he was as prolific as Alexander McCall Smith, he offers rich pickings for the dramatist.
William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair has had more than its fair share of attention, but The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, about an Irishman rather in the Flashman mode, would light up the screen. As would many works by Henry James, whose portraits of prejudice and rivalry in upper-class America and Europe, are both sharp and hilarious. Few authors nail their characters so vividly or precisely, being at the same time merciless and insightful.
However, if the BBC insists on reheating old favourites, then there is no finer book to revisit than George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It is almost 30 years since the last BBC adaptation, in 1994, with Rufus Sewell and Juliet Aubrey in leading roles. Fitting this long and complicated work into six episodes was almost as impressive a feat as the novel itself. If commissioning editors feel obliged to stick to the well-trodden path, then a new take on this brilliant piece of social and political observation is surely the way to go.
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