Great Expectations

Can Sarah Phelps' adaptation live up to previous
outings of Dickens greats? © BBC 2011

At last, another big Dickensian on the BBC. Having been blown away in my mid-teens by Andrew Davies’ gaspingly epic Bleak House (just look at the cast list – 50 names in the principal corps and not one of them without a Wikipedia article) and the slightly smaller but no less enjoyable Little Dorrit in 2008, it’s about time. But does this three-hour tiddler show the BBC tightening its purse strings, or a lesser commitment to gargantuan period storytelling? Let’s hope not.

Bleak House gave us
a taste of what
Dickensian drama
could be.

Bleak House, with its sit-up-straight namedropping of Alun Armstrong, Alistair McGowan, Denis Lawson, Charles Dance, Warren Clarke, Richard Griffiths, Sheila Hancock, Carey Mulligan, Johnny Vegas, Timothy West, Catherine Tate, Peter Guinness, Anne Reid, Liza Tarbuck, Ian Richardson, Nathaniel Parker, Burn Gorman, Phil Davis and Gillian Anderson’s neck cavities was hailed by the British and American press as a masterpiece and cleaned up at the BAFTAs and Emmys, catching five of the former and two of the latter – not to mention two Golden Globe nominations and a Peabody. With a budget of £8 million for eight hours of screen time and as the first major British drama filmed in HD, Auntie Beeb was surely glad it did so well – and it looked like a green light for further projects in a similar vein. 

Little Dorrit repeated
the success, to
great applause.

Davies attempted to repeat the success with his follow-up, Little Dorrit; with the same running time, what I assume was a similar budget, and a slightly shorter cast – though by no means less formidable. Alun Armstrong returned, joined by able newcomer Claire Foy as the lead, and backed up by known greats to the tune of Judy Parfitt, Tom Courtenay, Andy Serkis, Matthew Macfadyen, Amanda Redman, Anton Lesser, Sue Johnston, Bill Paterson, Ruth Jones, Annette Crosbie, Ron Cook, Maxine Peake and Pam Ferris – with a fantastic Dickensian airing for lesser known young names including Arthur Darvill, Russell Tovey, Freema Agyeman and Eve Myles. (Side note – isn’t it interesting how many of these have since ended up in Doctor Who or Torchwood?) Once again, the production was highly lauded and found its pockets weighed down with seven Emmy wins, four other nominations, and five BAFTA nods. 

Vanessa Kirby and Douglas Booth fail
to find chemistry on screen - or
even emotion.

Three years later the Corporation is offering us Sarah Phelps’ adaptation of Great Expectations – no small name among the Dickens bibliography but a significantly smaller production, with a significantly different writer. Clocking in at only three hours and with a principal cast of 13 (which is pretty much the entire speaking cast, plus three child actors for the first episode), it looks like they haven’t been as willing to shell out for this one. Gillian Anderson returns (in a much-trumpeted portrayal of Miss Havisham, the youngest actress ever to do so), along with Ray Winstone, David Suchet and a minor role for Mark Addy – but the rest of the cast, while up-and-coming, are by no means big names. Some of the smaller names do well though – while Anderson is ethereal and complicated (with her experience in Bleak House no doubt helping) and Suchet is magnificently stentorian and authoritative as always, I found the best performances coming from the younger actors – with the exception of the lead. Douglas Booth may be an actor to watch – I haven’t seen any of his other projects in their entirety, but I have Christopher and His Kind waiting for me to view, and from short clips of Worried About the Boy (his starring role at the age of 17) I think he has certain potential. But from this? Not a star at all. He carried the air of the majority of his lines well, but apart from utterly not looking the part of a marsh lad dressed up for the City, his face gave very little emotion. His eyes seemed almost immovable from their Burberry-model, slightly deer-in-headlights neutral stance, and this broke the deal for me. Even when crying, we only saw a solitary tear make its way down a perfectly smooth, unresponsive cheek. An insipid performance that wasn’t helped by an un-nuanced script that seemed to lack the flavour heard in previous productions of Dickens.

Oscar Kennedy stands up across from
Ray Winstone's Magwitch.

In contrast, Oscar Kennedy as his younger self does a brilliant job. His entirely believable reactions and honest, touching relationship with Joe (Shaun Dooley) make the first episode for me, and he completely carries the initial five minutes by himself in a marshy wasteland (beautifully colour graded for effect), and subsequently opposite the formidable Winstone. His counterpart child actress, Izzy Meikle-Small also entirely holds her own during the scenes in Satis House, showing the cold streak her adoptive mother is training her for, but with just the right gaps for other emotions to leak through. Seeing Harry Lloyd play a nice character (I missed Robin Hood but loved Game of Thrones and his episode of Doctor Who) makes a nice change – and after seeing him as such vindictive bastards it turns out he can be a wonderfully heartwarming friend to Pip with a beautiful natural smile! It’s no surprise that he was cast though – this is the second project he’s done related to his great-great-great grandfather Charles Dickens. 

The number of Dickens-Doctor
Who cast crossovers is startling.

Shaun Dooley thankfully returns in the later episodes, however briefly, and apart from having the perfect face for his character, it is his relationship with both the young and adult Pip that I find the most fulfilling in the entire piece, seconded by that with Herbert Pocket and then Paul Ritter’s Wemmick. Further mentions must go to the startlingly nasty Tom Burke as the eminently punchable Bentley Drummle, with just the right level of sneer (although I do wish that an actor with a cleft lip would get to play a nice guy one day) and the briefest of appearances from the well-poised Frances Barber (Doctor Who series 6’s deliciously bone-chilling Madame Kovarian; I’m really not making up these connections) as the proprietor of the “meat market” in which Drummle picks up the vulnerable Estella. 

I think the production suffers mostly in the script. It’s apparent that former Eastenders writer Phelps isn’t as experienced as 72-year-old Davies, and as such gives us a screenplay that’s even more like a soap than Little Dorrit’s format was, with anachronistic dialogue that has lost the detail and flair of Dickens. This is best shown in the corny lines near the end of the third episode wherein Pip ‘forgives’ Miss Havisham for her manipulation of his and Estella’s lives, all because she writes him a cheque to get him out of a sticky situation. I trust that Havisham’s theatrical self-immolation suicide also wasn’t as hackneyed in the original text (which I haven’t read). However, production aspects of the series also lack much originality. While the camera movement and colour grading in the opening moments of the first episode showed great promise, introducing the feel of the marsh environment beautifully, this is soon lost to a series of unimaginative shots – some downright uncomfortable (such as Pip and Estella’s joint carriage ride). This lack of imagination continued into the lighting, particularly after the first half of the first episode, when it seemed to lose all inspiration. 

The two young actors juxtaposed - who
ended up better cast than their
adult counterparts.

At several points throughout, somebody even decided to deploy the slow motion button – whatever possessed them I’m not sure, but the result was a jolt right out of the realism of the scene. We really didn’t need such an obtrusive technique at such moments as the scenes of dancing, Magwitch’s reveal at the end of the second episode, or the two hammed-up kisses between Pip and Estella – to which the crescendoing violins added precisely nothing. But I think the final element of the production that shows the tightening of the BBC’s purse strings is in the location scouting.

The back of the Luton Hoo estate -
one of the apparently twenty or so
buildings that existed in Dickensian
England.

I considered opening with this as it struck me so hard – almost every other location in this serial has been brazenly reused from Little Dorrit or Bleak House! Need I list them? My suspicion was first aroused upon young Pip’s first visit to Satis House – peering around the ghostly glow of Gillian Anderson we find the same staircase and landing from Mrs Clennam’s crumbling home. Then after a break, Pip arrives in London – to be housed in William Dorrit’s room in the Marshalsea Debtors’ prison, reached via one of Hampton Court Palace’s courtyards. The lawyer Mr Jaggers has apparently inherited his clerks’ office from Bleak House’s Mr Tulkinghorn, and Herbert’s shipping job must have leased a room or two from Arthur Clennam and Daniel Doyce’s factory in Bleeding Heart Yard (Luton Hoo in real life). We are then shown to Mrs Brandley’s rooms, time-shared with Amanda Redman’s Mrs Merdle – and then as the icing on the cake, Estella runs out of the colonnade of London’s Royal Naval College (used for tracking shots of a city street in Little Dorrit and the outside of the Circumlocution Office in Bleak House) to find her dead husband. If the location manager for Great Expectations wasn’t reanimated from these previous productions’ prop storage, they must have at least found their predecessor’s notebook.

Fortunately you can still catch all three episodes of Great Expectations on BBC iPlayer for the next week and judge for yourselves – it’s worth watching, but more for the story and first episode than any specific performances or the mechanics of the writing. In fact, I’d say the secondary cast (if you can really split such a diminished number into tiers) turn in better overall performances than the headliners.

 All images © BBC.