Robert Giddings previews what will be perhaps the brightest of the highlights of the autumn television schedule and talks to its celebrated adaptor
BBC 1’s new 14-episode serialisation of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit adapted by Andrew Davies is a cracker. It follows the same format as Davies’ and the corporation’s take on Bleak House a couple of years ago: an opening hour introductory sampler, followed by half-hour episodes. It’s all very colourful, lively, engaging and handsome to look at. And mercifully, it doesn’t energetically strive towards “Victorianism”, if you know what I mean.
Davies enjoys a reputation as a supreme dramatist. He’s more famous than some of writers he’s adapted for film and television. Among many successes acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, just three of the best known are Bridget Jones’ Diary, House of Cards and Pride and Prejudice. He wrote the screenplay of the recently released film of Brideshead Revisited. Little Dorrit has long been a favourite of Davies. He told me he read it “as part of a Dickens jog I went on 30 years ago”. He has wanted to adapt it for TV at that time but “had no clout”. But now he is able to exert his well-earned influence to magnificent effect. This new serial will lighten the gloomy weeks ahead, believe me.
Davies considers Dorrit hugely rewarding, despite its never having engaged the public’s affections in quite the same measure as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or Great Expectations.
“Most of the audience will come to it completely fresh”, he predicts, “with no preconceptions except that ‘it’s come from the same people who brought you Bleak House’. So they’ll give it a chance and appreciate its qualities – a lot of them similar to pervading mysteries from the past, a huge cast of characters, a picture of a whole society, some great comedy and some heart-rending near tragedy.”
Dorrit is a complex novel with a slow-burning exposition that has deterred many a determined reader: Says Andrew Davies: “That opening chapter must have put a lot of people off. I found that, in adapting it for TV, I needed to unpick the story elements and put them together again so that the audience could glimpse the connections. I tackled the basic problem of narrative voice by simply dramatising everything. The camera substitutes for the descriptive passages, but it tends to be a bit too naturalistic, of course.”
We start with a mysterious birth in Marshalsea debtors’ prison and the return of 40-year-old Arthur Clennam (Matthew Macfadyen) from his father’s business in China. He comes home to a place he scarcely knows. And the world he now finds himself in is full of mystery. There is the guilt-ridden, Bible-obsessed mother (Judy Parfitt); the meek little seamstress, Amy Dorrit (Claire Foy) whose unknown origins fascinate Arthur from the start. Meanwhile, his beloved old servant, Affery, is living in terror with her butler husband (another master-class in acting from Alun Armstrong) and the key to the whole mystery, is the Father of the debtors’ prison (Tom Courtenay).
All these characters are connected – from top to bottom – with all layers of English society, from the poor starving in the streets to the city financiers who (as we all know) have our world firmly grasped by the balls. To appreciate this story is to realise what glib claptrap Margaret Thatcher was spouting when she said there was no such thing as society. There is indeed such a thing and we all in it up to our necks in it – for better or worse.
As Davies points out, Little Dorrit is not just grim social satire. It is true to Dickens’ natural tendency to see the comic in all things: “The humour isn’t simply cruel – there’s something very poignant as well as ridiculous in what Flora has become. And she is wonderfully funny – a lot of her speeches seem to come straight from the unconsciousness. Freud would have loved her”. Flora is Arthur’s sweetheart from the long lost past, now grown into an affected and painfully coy middle-aged plumpness.
The Father of Marshalsea has spent most of his adult life in confinement, but more or less runs the prison like a personal kingdom. Davies says: “In his evasions, his self-promotion, his craftiness, his pomposity, his childlike neediness, he’s much more than funny. It’s like a great Shakespearean role and Tom Courtenay is having a ball with it.”
Davies is fully aware of the way Dickens always seems Victorian and contemporary at the same time. “The Circumlocution Office still resonates with anyone who’s spent all day on the phone trying to get through to a Government department. Merdle, the banker, has a spectacular City crash that is very topical. At a deeper and more universal level, it’s very much about hypocrisy, about putting people on a show, and deceiving other and oneself as a path to success. It you think about it, maybe Amy, Little Dorrit, is true to herself in an absolute way, although Arthur Clennam is searching to lead the good life.”
Meanwhile, to make any car journey a constant joy, Naxos has just issued an audio book of Dickens’ masterpiece read by the magisterial Anton Lesser. So, bugger the bankers – there’s still much in life to enjoy that’s beyond price. And you don’t have to believe me, when you’ve got Dickens’ own words to prove it.
Little Dorrit begins on BBC 1 on Monday October 27
