A wartime battle of sexuality
VANESSA REDGRAVE and Joanna Vanderham are playing the same role — across a divide of nearly seven decades.
The actresses star in novelist Patrick Gale’s original television film Man In An Orange Shirt.
The drama in two parts started filming last week and is a love story that begins in 1944, when an Army captain Michael Berryman (Oliver JacksonCohen) develops an intimate friendship with a war artist (James McArdle — so good in the Chekhov trilogy, seen first at Chichester and again this summer at the National).
Vanderham plays Flora, the young woman Berryman is engaged to marry.
Redgrave is Flora in presentday Britain. Her grandson, played by Julian Morris, is beginning an affair with a man (played by David Gyasi).
Patrick Gale’s drama explores the differing attitudes towards sexuality, from the Forties to the modern day.
Man In An Orange Shirt is being directed for BBC1 by Michael Samuels. It’s made by the Kudos production company: the people behind Grantchester, Life On Mars and Spooks (which, though it has been off the air for years, remains my favourite TV spy show).
The cast also includes Laura Carmichael (who is superb in the forthcoming film A United Kingdom), Julian Sands, Tommy Bastow, Angel Coulby and James Godden.