Dancing with the tsars
Ballgowns and breeches, flirting, fighting and duels... and the Russian Mr Darcy! As the BBC’s racy new War And Peace begins, cast and crew tell all about the TV event of 2016. By Lisa Sewards and Liz Hoggard
Twenty years ago Andrew Davies sexed up Jane Austen with a fresh, modern adaptation of Pride And Prejudice for the BBC that made stars of Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, and had 10 million viewers each week hanging on every word uttered by Lizzy Bennet and every rippling crease of Mr Darcy’s shirt.
Now he’s done the same thing for a Russian classic. War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel first published in 1869, has been turned into a lavish BBC1 drama starring the cream of British acting talent. Filmed over nearly a year on location in Latvia, Lithuania (its capital Vilnius has many buildings in the Imperial Russian style) and St Petersburg, where they had access to the majestic Catherine Palace, the series boasts 120 main actors and thousands of extras and promises to be the TV event of 2016.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time, War And Peace is a doorstopper of a book at more than 1,300 pages, melding fact and fiction and covering universal themes of love and loss, repression and redemption. It begins in 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 invasion of Russia by Napoleon’s Grande Armée, a tumultuous period in Russian history, telling the stories of two fictional grand aristocratic families – the bohemian, freespending Rostovs and the highminded, military Bolkonskys – and their circle of acquaintances as they socialise, quarrel and fall passionately in love. In many ways it’s a companion piece to Pride And Prejudice, says Andrew, a soap opera set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. ‘It’s got that Austen-y thing of two girls in their nighties saying, “How do you know when you’re in love?”’
Not only does it have a charismatic teenage heroine in Natasha Rostova (an ‘a’ is usually added to Russian women’s last names to indicate gender), but there are also flirtations and duels, epic battle scenes, tragic deaths and a love triangle that will melt even the hardest heart. Downton Abbey and Cinderella star Lily James plays Natasha, who in a poll narrowly beat energetic, intelligent, resilient Lizzy Bennet as the most lovable heroine ever in literature; man of the moment James Norton, star of Happy Valley and Grantchester, is cast as the handsome, troubled Prince Andrei Bolkonsky – the Russian Mr Darcy, according to Andrew Davies – and Andrei’s friend and love rival Pierre Bezukhov is played by Hollywood actor Paul Dano of 12 Years A Slave fame.
Andrew, 79, who also brought House Of Cards, Little Dorrit, Bleak House and Vanity Fair to TV, among others, admits he’d never read War And Peace before the BBC approached him to adapt it. ‘But the idea of doing something as big as this was very appealing. Even more so when I’d read the book because it just felt much fresher and more modern than I was expecting. The leading characters are all fascinating young people, full of eagerness and passion. It was delightful to write, and of course there’s the huge, sweeping scale of it.’
His nightmare task was to condense the sprawling plot down to some eight hours, to be aired in six episodes. In contrast, the acclaimed 1972 BBC version starring Anthony Hopkins as Pierre was a 15-hour, 20-part drama. Andrew, though, is typically gung-ho. ‘Watching the 1972 version it seemed incredibly stodgy to me, except for Hopkins’s performance, which seemed modern and vibrant. I couldn’t watch much of it. It didn’t feel real, so I hope ours does.’
Julia Stannard, the series producer, admits they’ve had to be ruthless. ‘It’s about capturing what’s important and relatable and what still feels contemporary and alive. We’ve had to make painful decisions. We’ve had to let go
of sections we all love. But it’s an eternal story. The characters have the same dilemmas we all have now.’
Andrew says headored writing the character of Natasha. ‘She’s so young and so vulnerable. Lizzy Bennet is great but she manages to keep her cool much more than Natasha. Natasha is all emotion – she thinks with her heart and her feelings, which gets her into trouble. Lizzy makes a big mistake about Darcy but it’s a kind of error of judgment, which she has the opportunity to remedy. But the mistake Natasha makes means she’s practically ruined, as though her life’s over. So she has to suffer much more, and maybe because of that we feel more deeply for her. She and Pierre are the moral touchstones of the story. They both get things wrong but their instincts are all right.’ For Lily James, being cast as Natasha was a dream come true. ‘It was daunting at first because Andrew said Natasha is the most lovable character in the whole thing. But reading the book, I got to the first passage about her and it describes her as “a big-eyed, not beautiful but lively girl”, as she runs into the room. It describes her as burying her face in her mother’s dress and laughing, and this makes everyone in the room laugh. She’s so uninhibited and full of life, and immediately I felt so lucky to be her.’ In the drama Natasha has to age from a teenager to a mature woman, and Lily worked with the costume designer to make the transition convincing. ‘I strap myself down and have high-neck, little-girl dresses at first, and then suddenly Natasha’s discovering her sexuality and the dresses change and become more womanly,’ she explains.
‘That was really exciting, with lots of silk and pale, muted colours. In the book Tolstoy says Natasha’s skin hasn’t been damaged by the look of men compared to Pierre’s promiscuous wife Helene, who’s been looked at and touched so many times. So the costumes tied in with those ideas.’
It was also an opportunity for Lily to revisit her own adolescent rites of passage. ‘I had to think to the distant past of growing up, falling in love for the first time... I remember saying to my mum and my granny when I had my first boyfriend, “No one has ever been as in love as I am!” I keep thinking about that with Natasha, her conviction and instinct.
‘I wanted her to feel really young at the start, to accentuate her journey and to capture that spirit of youth and openness and excitement, where everything’s going to be OK. When her brother Nikolai goes off to war she thinks it’s going to be fine, because she hasn’t experienced grief yet. You can see why she gets led on by people later on.’
As Andrei, the intelligent, ambitious son of retired military commander Prince Bolkonsky and the key character in that family, James Norton has a similarly epic role to Lily. ‘Andrei’s this conflicted young man, he wants to find some sort of revolution in his life,’ says James. ‘He changes so radically in the book – he goes from being horribly cynical and bloodthirsty and glory-seeking, through this kind of depression, and then falls in love and goes to a high. I don’t think he’s the classic glamorous hero but as the story goes on you begin to empathise with him.
‘He’s quite brooding and the director Tom Harper had to keep telling me to stop smiling.
There’s so much stuff going on with Andrei.’ Did he worry about being handsome enough for the role? ‘If you start thinking about that you run the risk of starting to pout and I definitely didn’t want to do that,’ laughs James. ‘He’s a real bloke. I think his allure to the ladies is something he’s unaware of, it just comes naturally to him. It’s Andrei’s spirit that makes him so attractive. If you start thinking about looks you run a dangerous course because you start to be vain as an actor.’
James became‘very proud’ of his Russian family (his father is played by Jim Broadbent, while his sister is theatre star Jessie Buckley). ‘The family’s dysfunctional but deep down there’s an affection there, and we found that off-camera too. There were some very emotional scenes where Jim was incredibly volatile, screaming and laughing then suddenly bursting into tears. It was all very intense, then we’d go to a restaurant and play board games together!’
Connecting these two grand dynasties is Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei’s best friend, the socially awkward but likeable illegitimate son of a rich count who during the course of the book suffers a disastrous marriage, madness and imprisonment as he searches for the meaning of life. ‘He’s not innocent but he has something that most people lose as they become adults,’ says Paul Dano, who plays him. ‘He’s trying to figure out his purpose and how to be happy, he wants to do something with his life but he keeps trying and failing.’
Andrew Davies loves the way Tolstoy writes all the characters with a degree of sympathy – even the ‘baddies’ such as the chaotic, hedonistic Dolokhov (Tom Burke), who when he’s not fighting in battle has to create other trouble, and the dastardly Anatole Kuragin (Callum Turner). And, being Andrew Davies, he doesn’t shy away from the more risqué content of the book. ‘There’s a certain amount of nudity. When you expect someone to be nude, they are.’ But as we watch scenes of dancing and flirting in Russian high society, we’re all too aware that world events are about to intrude.
Napoleon invades Russia, leading to the epic Battle of Borodino which has a tumultuous effect on the key characters, with fortunes lost, lives transformed and loves kindled.
James Norton believes the real appeal of the book, and he hopes this new TV version, is that it touches on universal themes. ‘Ultimately what makes it special is that it’s a soap opera,’ he says. ‘A perfect portrayal of humanity with people falling in and out of love – revenge, jealousy and loss. It’s just about people.’