CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

by Jonathan Keates

(Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 24, 1982)

 

The Barchester Chronicles BBC2

Considered in the coldest of formal terms, Trollope is a gift to the television scriptwriter and director. Short on local colour (Barsetshire triumphs precisely because it is anywhere from Kent to Devon) and nearly always unmemorable on visual detail, he allows for complete liberty in set design and location shooting something precluded by the precise identifications of place with circumstance in books like Cranford, Bleak House or The Mill on the Floss. Very few characters, and those only in the early novels, are given the sort of canonical idiosyncracy which demands the re-creation of a Phiz Micawber or a Cattermole Quilp on the small screen. Trollope's sublime, sometimes maddening indulgence towards human foibles offers the actor ideal ground for sympathetic ipterpretation. Finally there is the matchless dialogue, exemplary among novelists- for its limpid ease and its subtle intimations of mood and pace.

Yet the medium has, until lately, been reluctant to take up its Trollopian options. The late 1950s produced a strongly cast Last Chronicle of Barset, with Hugh Burden imperishably blighted as Mr Crawley, and a contrastingly flaccid Small House at Allington. following which we had to wait nearly a decade before a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appeared in the adaptation of The Way We Live Now by Simon Raven. Its casual fidelity to the original should not have deceived us but the full ghastliness of what followed is a recurring nightmare to the true-hearted Trollopian. Raven treated the Palliser cycle on the same principles as those through which a moderately enterprising child with a limited imagination reacts towards a Lego set. The several structures were dismantled and reassembled as Alms for Oblivion in frock-coat and bustle. Men became coarse, venal and stupid as women turned into predatory, nymphomaniac harridans, "trollope" being, as it were, the parola scenica.

Production values kept manfully instep: the opening scenes of Can You Forgive Her? showed the protagonists jigging about on an open-air platform among rhododendrons to the strains of a kitsch Strauss pastiche, while dukes and viscounts tottered to and fro clutching half-empty bottles. The fact that several thousand genuine Viennese waltzes of the age exist for the picking and that dukes at garden parties had servants to carry their magnums about was neither here nor there. This, as Radio Times proudly boasted, was Susan's New Saga, and Miss Hampshire, still dewy with the tears half the world shed over her Fleur Forsyte, was to be permitted to survive throughout The Duke's Children, thus effectively sabotaging the crucial starting point of that superb autumnal work.

The People's Susan turns up again in Alan Plater's seven-Dart dramatization of The Warden and Barchester Towers, an admirable act of piety and penitence towards the novelist's troubled manes, and a lesson in the art of quiet, efficient transference of fiction to the screen. Initially it seems a pity that the later and stronger books in the series, the near-flawless Framley Parsonage for instance, were not chosen instead, the more so as Trollope's narrative mode during the 1850s underwent such radical changes in freeing itself from crude imitation of Dickens and Thackeray to establish an individual method. Such variation inevitably affects the television overlap of the first two books. The Warden is one of his shortest novels, but two episodes seems a rather beggarly allotment and renders the Hiram's Hospital dispute inappropriately trivial. Gone too is of course, any sense that constants like Eleanor Bold and the Grantlys undergo modification from book to book.

Such quibbles weigh lightly against David Giles's unobtrusive direction and a script which slyly manages to insert every familiar detail from the of novels at least once. Mr Harding's nervous 'cello bowing gets in, so do the Archdeacon's breakfast spread and his strictures to Arabin as to men with round dining tables, and even such elusive touches of dialogue as Mrs Quiverful calling her overburdened husband "Q". Those ample moments of reticence and subliminal communication between individuals which are Trollope's chief legacy to James are wonderfully suggested in the interchanges between Harding and to Eleanor or Dr. Proudie and "the bestial Slope".

Much of this depends on the finely tuned playing of a hand- picked cast, led by Nigel Hawthorne's hissing Lucifer of an Archdeacon, Clive Swift's goggling, wet-lipped Bishop and a gooseflesh-making Slope, all a angles and black gloves, from Alan Rickman. Employing the tones of a Wagnerian bass clarinet Geraldine McEwan, the only actress who can use her neck as a surrogate, turns Mrs Proudie into an evangelical Katherine Hepburn. As the eponymous Warden. Donald Pleasence gamely surmounts the obstacle of a set of pebble spectacles which suggest that he is preparing to dismember Slope and dispose of a portion or two inside the 'cello case, and Janet Maw's Eleanor is a delicious study in aggrieved but scarcely grieving widowhood. There is admirable support, too, from Susan Edmonstone and Peter Blythe as the Stanhopes and from the carefully underplayed Hampshire Signora, a more compassionate portrayal than the character perhaps deserves.

Design and location have been lovingly studied through the Bishbp's pectoral cross might raise a few eyebrows, and the house chosen for Plumstead, a sort of clerical Chatsworth, far overstates Grantlyite worldiness. The music, as alas so often, is all wrong. Has nobody at the BBC heard of S.S. Wesley? Otherwise, in contriving to persuade us that the cast and the production team have actually read, respected and even possibly understood their author, The Barchester Chronicles makes handsome amends for earlier barbarism and neglect.

 

 

Originally on KelClancy's Page