The Charles Dickens Collection: The Pickwick Papers; Oliver Twist; A Christmas Carol; Martin Chuzzlewit; David Copperfield; A Tale of Two Cities; Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend
BBC, £99
Kim by Rudyard Kipling read by Madhav Sharma
Naxos, £10.99
The French Revolution in a Nutshell by Neil Wenborn read by Rory McMillan
Naxos, £8.99
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Naxos, £10.99
It is a fact, universally acknowledged, that the BBC does adaptations of Charles Dickens rather well. Yeah, right. I have even heard it said that Dickens was made for television, because there are so many Dickens TV serials. But arithmetic is seldom usefully employed in aesthetics; by the same token Haydn is a greater symphonist than Brahms because he wrote more than 100 symphonies while Brahms managed only four.
What is undeniable is that television and film versions are taking over, producing alternative texts. An academic colleague opined that she did not reckon much to the Billie Piper Mansfield Park as it left out “all the stuff about the slave trade”. This is only briefly (and irrelevantly) referred to in the novel but, of course, considerably highlighted and extended in the politically correct post colonial film of some 10 years ago.
Jenni Murray, on her programme on Radio 4, ran a competition to find the book that had the biggest effect on readers and Pride and Prejudice topped the bill (no complaints there, naturally), but mainly because of the way it was all so beautifully rounded off with that wedding. But there is, of course, no wedding in the book; this beautiful addition was by that dab hand Andrew Davies when he adapted it for television.
On the face of it, dramatising a novel for the screen is a simple matter. All that is required is the translation of what the novelist imagined and wrote in words into moving pictures and sound, translation from one language to another. Few would expect exact translation – the precise and literal rendering of the original narrative prose. The art lies in finding the appropriate equivalent, the right style and tone, into which to recast the original. A translation does not replace the original.
With reference to translations of Horace, DS Carne-Ross made the point that translation is never a substitute for the original but, rather, a parallel text that brings to the fore new aspects while playing down others: “Judging how far a translator’s enlargements, his liberties with and additions to his author’s poem, are a wanton intrusion of his own substance, and how far (in Dryden’s words) they are ‘secretly in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him’ is a delicate business best decided case by case.”
Now few novelists better illustrate this problem than Dickens. Dickens is unmistakable. Dickens’ works, syntax, idiosyncrasy of dialogue, picturesque and masterly descriptions of scenes, recreations of moments of life, haunting observations of experience – these qualities are characteristic. Yet it is equally true that each of his major works is uniquely identifiably itself. Dombey and Son is unlike Martin Chuzzlewit. Bleak House is not mistakably like David Copperfield. Yet each is characteristically and unmistakably Dickens.
Each film or television version is a further attempt at the impossible, yet many have tremendous merit in their own right. This BBC Collection has been available since 2005 but is currently being much hyped for Christmas this year by the corporation. It is a bargain. But beware the variety of styles and tone.
A Christmas Carol has a cracking performance in the Scrooge of Michael Hordern (though he doesn’t sufficiently relish his own wickedness à la Richard III as Albert Finney did). Pickwick is OK, but not very funny (its original readers almost died reading it) and lacks that travelling around England feeling so quintessentially in the spirit of the book, although the interior stuff is good and the Dingley Dell Christmas felicitous. Oliver Twist (with a screenplay by Alan Bleasdale) is exceptionally well written and very well cast.
But David Copperfield is very disappointing. Bob Hoskins as Micawber is badly miscast (wasn’t Simon Callow, the best Micawber since Richardson, available?) although Trevor Eve is a magnificent Murdstone – the bastard. But the story is stripped to its bare bones. The novel has a pervading sense of what might have been, a constant awareness of the haphazard nature of life – the friend not met, the street not turned up, the decision not made. Much of that melancholy sense of aspects of life unfulfilled, has gone. This production has a consistently bright surface quality, the sun is always shining, the flowers are out, the trees are leafy, the skies are blue and joy is just around the corner.
Our Mutual Friend has terrific locations, atmosphere and a dedicated sincerity that’s highly commendable. Great Expectations is simply glum – Dickens considered it among his best humorous writing – but it has some terrific performances from Lesley Sharp, Charlotte Rampling and Justine Waddel.
Rudyard Kipling’s masterly Kim comes as quite a relief in this abridged version read by Madhav Sharma. It always comes up gold, packed with ravishing scenic descriptions, characters and a sense of culture and period as the orphan Irish lad, brought up in Lahore street life, who embarks on a fascinating journey, joining the Indian Civil Service and developing into a master spy.
A gripping narrative of quite another kind is to be found in Neil Wenborn’s The French Revolution. These cataclysmic events, beginning with the revelations of France’s lavish national extravagance and iniquitous taxation system, the collapse of the monarchy and continuing through the eruption of political turmoil into riots, tribunals, terror, military dictatorship and war, are really the foundation of modern Europe. (What price UKIP?) The questions raised seem blindingly contemporary to us in the modern world – the relationship between citizen and state, liberty and law, idealism and the realms of the possible, political ends and means. Not very festive, you may think, but this would be a present to treasure whose value will not decline even after years of use.
Finally, there is the 1953 radio production of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, with Thomas Mitchell and Arthur Kennedy. It gets the Broadway treatment by Elia Kazan (who premiered the play). It was a sensation to audiences in 1949 and continues to move with its mix of cynical satire, realism and pathos.
Just what you want from Christmas…
Robert Giddings
