A Dance to the Music of Time
Radio 4

ANTHONY POWELL’S magisterial cycle of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, was published between 1951-75. There are 12 volumes altogether, totalling some 3,000 pages. It is an original and compelling saga owing much to Proust, PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. The title comes from the famous painting by Nicholas Poussain.

Powell’s work chronicles the stories of a group of characters – middle-class bohemians, professionals, politicos and musicians –-from the end of the Great War, through the 1930s and into the 1970s. There are four main sections in the narrative: spring (school, university early adulthood); summer (marriage and work); autumn (the Second World War); and winter (the post-war years, ageing and death).

There is an array of characters, focusing mainly on Nick Jenkins and his circle, particularly the unlikeable but memorable Kenneth Widmerpool as well as a vast collection of minor yet still memorable characters. It’s a portrait of an age. I’ve always admired Powell’s mastery of effective narrative with its polished surface quality only slightly masking the darker shades of life.

Broadcasting has served Powell well. BBC radio broadcast a fine stereo serial version in 1979-80 written by Frederick Bradnum, produced by Graham Gould and with felicitous music by Anthony Maill. Later, in 1998, Channel 4 broadcast its four-part dramatisation with the definitive Widmerpool of Simon Russell-Beale. He is now president of the Anthony Powell Society.

Now we’re off again with a very promising six part classic serial version directed by John Taylor and written by the distinguished and award-winning playwright Michael Butt. His vast experience in radio drama, including versions of DH Lawrence, Baroness Orczy and plays about Wodehouse, Dickens and Ibsen, has led him to translate Powell’s complex, many-stranded prose narrative into natural and compelling radio. Corin Redgrave is our delightful guiding voice and Anthony Hoskyns makes a notable mark as Widmerpool.

The saga starts at school with Jenkins (Tom McHugh) and his mates making life miserable for the unfortunate Widmerpool, blissfully unaware that this strange, bespectacled, and socially inept creature is to dog them the rest of their lives.

Widmerpool is one of our literature’s immortals and will live forever in your memory (if you haven’t met him before). He reels from one embarrassing ineptitude to another. Early on, he exhibits his gross lack of sophistication by wearing the “wrong” kind of overcoat. Thereafter, any social gaff is known as “a Widmerpool”. Yet he is powered by unstoppable ambition and (I hope I don’t give too much away) he becomes an MP and eventually Lord Widmerpool, developing along the way a passion for a bizarre array of sexual activities.

It is said that Powell based him on an officer he served under, Colonel Denis Capel-Dunn and on Harold Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller. Winners of the Anthony Powell Society’s Annual Widmerpool Award have been Lord Derry Irvine of Lairg, Karl Rove and Sir Max Hastings.

This is essential dram and well worth getting addicted to. This must come outon CD.

Robert Giddings