A feminist battle-cry for the #Metoo generation
There are half a dozen much loved 19th-century novels on an adaptation rota. Jane Eyre, Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice come around as if by clockwork. The Woman in White is also on the list thanks to its status as the first ever unputdownable serial thriller. Airing on BBC One, this is the broadcaster’s fourth go at it in 50 years. But however much it’s loved, there’s not much point in exhuming the same old story without an up-to-date angle.
Well, we’ve got one here. Though it would have been commissioned long before Harvey Weinstein was exposed, the latest version was swift to position itself as a timely proto-feminist battle-cry for the #Metoo generation. In the lapel-grabbing opening, Marian Halcombe (Jessie Buckley) said it like it still is: “How is it men crush women time and time again and go unpunished?”
But there’s more to this telling than merely calling out Victorian abusers like Sir Percival Glyde (Dougray Scott), who has already been outed as an inheritance-hunter of doubtful sincerity. Any account of Wilkie Collins’s 1860 novel is only as good as its Marian. The BBC’S last two Marians – Diana Quick in 1982, Tara Fitzgerald in 1997 – were formidable but still feminised. Jessie Buckley’s interpretation is an invigorating tonic.
“You will soon find out we are not the most traditional ladies,” she advised. I’ll say. When the painter Walter Hartright first claps eyes on her in the novel, he’s taken aback when the young dark-haired woman with the shapely silhouette turns to reveal she’s “ugly” (Collins’s word, not mine). Plus she’s got a bit of a tache. Here he spotted Marian through a door, briskly fixing the laces on her leggings, part of a chappish get-up featuring culottelike strides and exotic smoking coats. She glugged brandy and smoothly wielded a billiard cue. She’s far more manly than Ben Hardy’s milksop Hartright. As the woman in trousers, Buckley’s splendid Ms Halcombe is shaping up to be a genderqueer pin-up in a “woke” Woman in White.
As in Ordeal by Innocence, the narrative kicked off abruptly with an untimely death. Before the credits had even played, the lid was drawn across the casket containing the mortal remains of Marian’s beautiful half-sister Laura Fairlie. Collins waited several hundred pages before he stunned his readers with that shock.
This is doubtless a calculated move. A contemporary audience of restless screen-hoppers prefers an up-front guarantee of thrills and chills to come. It slightly stole the thunder of the book’s famous opening, in which Hartright encountered the disturbed will o’ the wisp Anne Catherick after dark in a deserted London suburb.
As for the actual plot, director Carl Tibbetts and scriptwriter Fiona Seres have shrewdly kept faith with the novel’s piecemeal structure in which the various characters all tell bits of the story from their own point of view. Here they make witness statements to a dependable lawyer (Art Malik).
The other thing I liked about this new take was the way that, much more than the BBC’S single drama version in 1997, it frankly embraced the trappings of serial melodrama: coincidence, sensation, an astonishing likeness. Olivia Vinall deftly portrayed both the vanilla heiress Laura and the nervy asylum escapee Anne, the latter deformed by an alarming set of Addams Family dentures. Playing Laura, a passive chattel of the patriarchy, can be a short straw, but here Vinall was granted agency, racily proposing a dip in the sea, and diving in for the first kiss with Walter.
There were also less charming signs of bracing modernity, including an absolute paradiddle of glottal stops: “Hartright” often came out as “Har’righ’”. My eyes involuntarily rolled at the dark roots to Laura’s bottle-blonde hair, and the word “subconscious” borrowed anachronistically from the future. The magic of the shooting schedule found some trees were stripped for winter while the Limmeridge garden was in full Miracle Gro bloom. (Cumberland is handsomely impersonated by Northern Ireland.)
Charles Dance is glorious as Frederick Fairlie, the half-sisters’ fusspotty old uncle. His grumbles about enfeebled health felt especially ridiculous in a figure of such bruising physical heft and a peremptory bass voice that issues forth in clipped stentorian barks. He looks about as unwell as a peak-condition prizefighter. Still, no matter. This stirring series treads a neat line between fidelity and up-to-date social commentary.
The Woman in White ★★★★