War and Peace

Stop whingeing and enjoy the drama

If the test of a Sunday night costume drama lies in viewing figures and critical reaction, then Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace has been a triumph. With 6.3 million of us choosing it as our Sunday night viewing, the reviews have been as sparkling as the chandeliers in the early 19th-century Saint Petersburg salons where episode one began.

Yet last week there was also a chorus of complaint on social media: about the casting; the actors’ murmuring; how it all looks more like Jane Austen’s Georgian England than Tsarist Russia; the filleting of a 1,500-page text to fit in six hours of television time; and the incestuous clinch between Princess Helene Kuragin (Tuppence Middleton) and her brother, Anatole (Callum Turner).

Orlando Figes is having none of it. “Whingers” is how the broadcaster, award-winning writer on Russia, and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, characterises those who have spent the past week picking away at the TV adaptation on which he worked as historical advisor.

He robustly rejects those who have got hot under the collar about the bedroom scene. “It was nothing more than a bit of horseplay, which showed the Kuragins as naughty people,” he says. “The fuss is overblown and anyway, it is hinted at by Tolstoy himself. I can only think that Simon Schama [his fellow historian, who has described the Kuragins’ romp as ‘totally inappropriate’] hadn’t actually seen it before he made his comment.”

He is equally firm with those moaning that episode one was just too complicated to follow. “I think it gets better as you move forward in the story,” says Prof Figes. “But I was hugely impressed by how many characters and relationships Andrew Davies got rolling very smoothly, while also building up momentum.”

Another controversy is the casting as Natasha Rostova, Tolstoy’s complex heroine, of Lily James, who made her name in that rather more lightweight

Downton Abbey. Figes played no role in picking the actors. But when introduced to the cast, he instinctively felt all of them “fitted the characters they were to play”. James, he says, “has the vivacious spirit” required of the young Natasha.

Tom Harper, the director, is just as quick to jump to James’s defence. “When you’re looking to cast the best actors, inevitably there will be some crossover with other successful shows, particularly when there are as many characters as there are in War and

Peace,” he says. “I can, hand on heart, say that all the actors were cast for

their talent and suitability in the role.”

Comparisons with other smallscreen adaptations of classic books are inevitable. Andrew Davies encouraged the process when he hailed James Norton – who plays the key character of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, in the midst of an existential crisis – as “the new Mr Darcy”. He was referring not to the hero as penned by Jane Austen but to Colin Firth’s portrayal of him, all wet shirt, tight breeches and longing looks, in Davies’s 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice.

But his War and Peace is accused of being “too English”, “too Georgian” and even “too Jane Austen” – charges Harper also rejects. “To me, War and

Peace has a very different feel to Austen. It has the grit, mud and blood of war as well as the machinations of the drawing room scenes. The canvas is bigger, but it is more than that. The themes at the heart of the story – the search for meaning, disillusionment, progress and possibility – are different from Austen.”

So no similarities? Episode one did seem intent on setting up a number of potential love affairs. “Of course,” he concedes, “there are obvious parallels. The stories are set in the same period, and love and romance is also central to

War and Peace.”

Prof Figes shares Harper’s misgivings about any comparisons with Austen, though. “Not to belittle

her, but to judge an adaptation of War

and Peace through the lens of Jane Austen is to reduce it and ignore its epic scale,” he says.

As for “too English”, he feels those complaining are taking things too literally. “This is an English language adaptation of a Russian book, so inevitably it is going to sound English. But that sets up a creative tension for me as someone whose job was to be true to history and true to the book,

because War and Peace is a national epic. It covers a phase of Russia’s history when it was finding its own national identity and liberating itself from the French.”

The real challenge of the adaptation, he believes, was to convey something at the heart of Tolstoy’s work – the “Russification of society” and its rejection of French influence that came when Russia was at war with Napoleon. And when it came to specific historical details, Figes did have to veto several anachronisms in the script. In one scene, amid the 1812 Battle of Borodino, soldiers were shown sheltering in tents. He pointed out, however, that the ranks wouldn’t have used such a shelter, and they were replaced by rougher bivouacs. In the final episode, when the surviving characters gather in 1820 to be captured for posterity by a photographer’s flash bulb, he advised that the technology did not yet exist.

“There may be others tiny things that are not right,” he admits, “but I would urge those who complain to remember that War and Peace itself was not historically accurate. Tolstoy wrote it in the 1860s, looking back over 40 years, and he always claimed it wasn’t a novel at all, rather a philosophical treatise on history, life and death, and how to live well.”

The issue of modernity – making a 19th century novel relevant – is a key part of Davies’s much-garlanded skill as an adaptor. So while some have complained that certain words and phrases used on screen would not have been in common use in the 1810s, Harper is unrepentant.

“It was a conscious decision from Andrew to make the language modern and therefore more immediate and immersive for the audience,” he says.

“Tolstoy’s characters and situations are so vital and vibrant, and I have tried to capture the essence of this and convey it on screen in a way people can immediately connect with,” he says.

When the critics’ verdicts are forgotten and the social media storm has passed, it is this that will keep us all watching through till the end.