Bonnets, Bustles and Eileen Atkins
When the Cockney actor Brian Croucher was being auditioned for a television serialisation of Wives and Daughters at the BBC some years ago, he was asked if he knew anything about Mrs Gaskell. “Yeh,” he replied, “she runs the Royal Court, don’t she?”
Brian was of course mistakenly referring to Bill Gaskill, the Court’s then artistic director, not the 19th century lady novelist whose husband’s name was, funnily enough, William.
One is suspicious of all superlatives hurled at television drama these days because there’s so little of any merit whatsoever. Those vacuous, obscenely over-budgeted and pretentious Stephen Poliakoff films were a soulless rip-off of Pinter, Mike Leigh and even early Poliakoff himself, with the small saving graces of some full-on gratuitous rumpy-pumpy between Kelly Reilly and Rupert Penry-Jones and a wonderfully still, stricken performance from Maggie Smith in Judith Hearne mode.
But Cranford is something else. Wise, witty and beautifully written by Heidi Thomas, with the best of British acting right the way through the cast. And what a cast! Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton, Julia McKenzie, Jim Carter, Robert Glenister, Julia Swahala, Lisa Dillon, Michael Gambon…
No such gathering these days can be found at the National or the RSC, let alone in the West End. And all this talent came from the theatre to start with, including the director Simon Curtis, producer Sue Birtwistle and executive producer Kate Harwood. I even remember Heidi Thomas herself as a prize-winning student playwright at the National Youth Theatre.
She has done a wonderful job in weaving the narrative lines from three of the Gaskell novels, though not such a good one in killing off Eileen Atkins at the end of the second episode. Atkins, straining after etiquette and melting into friendship while her eyes bulged and her jaw slackened, was one of the most wonderful sights of the year. And now we have to wait and see how her surviving sister, Judi Dench, deals with the unexpected appearance of Michael Gambon at Francesca Annis’s garden party…
Cranford is hardly just a costume drama of bonnets and bustles. The business of life and death is large enough, but there have been two extraordinary tales of recovery: the daring operation by the new young doctor on the gardener’s broken arm; and the rescue from a greedy cat of a swallowed lace collar by inducing its excretion by laxative.
Both incidents were enacted with grisly realism. And then there was the cow who fell in a lime pit, lost all its hairy coating and was dressed in grey flannel pyjamas to save the blushes of the neighbourhood!
There are only three more episodes to go, and I’m going to miss them even before I’ve seen them. There have been lots of Mrs Gaskell adaptations on televison, contrary to all the surprised hoo-ha going on at the moment, and of course lots of Jane Austen (Sue Birtwistle was responsible for a very good Pride and Prejudice ten or so years ago).
But this series seems to be setting new standards in matching charm with brisk standards of editing and composition. The lighting is superb. The locations are fabulous. But it is the acting that really sets it apart. And it’s so much better for not having Kiera Knightley in it.