War and Peace
The last episode – watch it and weep
WITH multiple deaths, a handful of proposals and hundreds of pages of Tolstoy’s book to go, fans of War and
Peace may have been left wondering how makers of the current BBC series propose to finish the Napoleonic Wars in just one episode.
The answer, it seems, is simple: ask the BBC to grant its first extension to a Sunday night drama finale, giving it a bonus 20 minutes.
The period drama will run to 80 minutes tonight as characters plough through “an enormous amount of suffering” before the stories of Natasha, Prince Andrei and Pierre are resolved. In an interview with The Sunday
Telegraph, the show’s producer warned that there would be “no Hollywood ending”, cautioning viewers to open a box of tissues in preparation.
Andrew Davies, the scriptwriter, added his own promise that one character would find a “brilliant” resolution, after admitting he wished he had written more episodes for the six-part series.
Julia Stannard, the producer who has worked on the programme for three years, said the popularity and critical success of Warand-Peace proved audiences can handle stories thought to be “inaccessible and impenetrable”, paving the way for more highbrow foreign-language literature to be adapted.
Stannard said the BBC originally planned for War and Peace to run for six hours, but editors realised they could not bear to cut any more out.
It is understood to be the first time the BBC has granted a relatively lastminute extension to a Sunday night drama, after realising there was so much storyline left to cover.
“The BBC has been very generous and allowed us that bit of extra time,” she said. “I hope the audience will feel it’s a bit of a treat on Sunday night.”
Speaking of the ending, she said: “It’s an episode of extreme emotions. I’d really tell everybody to have a box of tissues. We end episode five with characters facing enormous dilemmas. Things will get worse before they get better for a fair few of them.
“It isn’t a happy ending all round. What’s important is that it feels very real; there are no Hollywood endings here. Life isn’t easy, it isn’t always kind and things don’t always happen the way we want them to. But I think there is a truthful simplicity about it and I hope people will find an appropriate end to the story.”
The final episode also introduces another character who will touch the hearts of viewers. A dog called Sashenka – belonging to the peasant Karatev – has a profound effect on Paul Dano’s Pierre Bezukhov in an hour of desperation.
Admitting people had “thought they were mad” to take the book on, she added: “People were like, ‘Really, are you sure?’ There was this huge sense of, ‘What on earth are you doing? You’re setting yourself up for a huge fall.’ But I think we were just up for giving it the best shot we could.”
In the end, she said, the team had decided simply to work to “high ambitions”, refusing to “shy away” from gory battle scenes for fear of accusations of “copping out”. When asked what programme-makers had learnt, she said: “Never underestimate your audience. Don’t be afraid of things that feel inaccessible and impenetrable.
“That’s not about dumbing down. That was another fear; that we could do the easy thing and dumb it down and avoid all the key Tolstoyan themes.” Davies added that in writing the final episodes he was attempting “To do … what the characters are trying to do for themselves; trying to find a resolution to their stories. There’s an enormous amount of suffering, both physical and emotional. They have to go through all that to come out the other side.”
Stannard added that she hoped it would help people get over any fear of tackling tricky foreign-language literature on television and branch out.
“We do all get, possibly, tired of the same pieces of literature being adapted again and again and again,” she said. “Other Russian writers – Italian, French – there is a whole world to explore. Perhaps it is time to start digging into those and see what we should be tackling next. (Albert) Camus, (Jean-Paul) Sartre; some of the wonderful existentialist writing. I’d love to have a go at that. I think that’s incredibly relevant now.”
With consolidated ratings of 7.2million, War
and Peace has been considered a success for the BBC. It has, however, faced some criticism, with claims of historical inaccuracy and complaints about male nudity.
“If there’s a historical inaccuracy and we’ve got it wrong then I want to apologise,” said Stannard. “If we got something wrong, I wish we’d got it right. But if you look at the millions of opportunities there were for things to go wrong, I think there’s one medal so far that’s upset people. We made a mistake, but I hope it didn’t spoil anybody’s enjoyment of the piece. If we’d made anything up and added it in for the sake of pulling in audiences with scandal, then I wouldn’t feel good about that.
“As far as the naked men are concerned, it’s a really important scene for Andrei to see the flesh and vulnerability of them and know they’re going to be cannon fodder, as he says.”
The final episode of War and Peace will be shown on BBC One at 9pm and reviewed in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph
‘It’s an episode of extreme emotions. I’d really tell everybody to have a box of tissues’
If anyone could bring War and
Peace successfully to television, it is Andrew Davies – the master at transforming classic literature into BBC drama. Davies has just the right mix of intelligence and populism to straddle the two forms. Still, for all his talent, War and
Peace – which finishes tonight – never convincingly made the leap from page to screen. It’s not his fault. The truth is that telly rarely does justice to great books.
In the end, long, old books and new films are just too different. Tolstoy was writing more than 1,000 pages in 1869, about events that had taken place only 60 years earlier. To compress that volume of historical characters and scenes into six hours of compelling television is impossible. Even Davies admitted this week that he would have preferred eight hours; that he had to drop some scenes to squeeze everything in.
So, inevitably, you end up with a tide of names and blood ties that are hard to follow on screen. It’s that much easier on the page – where you can always flick back to remind yourself of things; where reading impresses details more deeply on the brain than viewing.
With that degree of compression, even a gifted screenwriter like Davies had to lever in some plot exposition to keep the viewer in the know. So Adrian Edmondson, as Count Rostov, has to behave like Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey – striding into the drawing room, newspaper in hand, declaring mournfully to his family, “We are at war.”
The older the book, and the further ago the events it describes, the more artificial the modern TV adaptation. Tolstoy’s readers would have known all about the battles described in
War and Peace – their fathers and grandfathers fought and died in them. The modern British viewer doesn’t, and so needs more details explained.
“Show, don’t tell” is the holy commandment of screenwriters. Anyone adapting an old classic, with a history-heavy plotline, has to do an awful lot of telling and showing.
A foreign setting, and a book written in a foreign language, make a telly adaptation even trickier. The beauty of Tolstoy’s Russian is gone, as is the intricacy of his references to Russian politics and everyday life.
Artifice creeps in everywhere. So, in this new adaptation, the French characters speak English with a French accent. But the posh Russian characters speak English with public school English accents; the peasants speak with northern English accents. Think about it for a second and it’s ludicrous. Any screenwriter has to use these tricks, of course: a BBC War
and Peace in Russian would get tiny viewing figures. But the moment you switch languages, the nuances of the original immediately vanish.
Telly can do drama at great length. In fact, we’ve entered a golden age of long-form TV drama. The Wire had 60 one-hour episodes over five seasons;
The Sopranos had 86 episodes over six seasons. But these dramas were specifically designed for television, and they logically had the demands of TV built into them. In each episode, there were concurrent plots, a build-up of tension and a scattering of sex and violence to perk up the sleepy viewer.
It isn’t Tolstoy’s fault that he didn’t introduce the right degree of sex, violence and tension every 200 or so pages. But that does mean it all ends up a bit flat on screen, with little sense of a real cliffhanger at the end of each episode.
Very occasionally, telly does adapt a classic novel successfully. The 1981
Brideshead Revisited series was a triumph. But that was because it was given 11 one-hour episodes to cover a relatively short book: 326 pages in the Penguin Classic edition. No plot compression required.
It helped that the actors, particularly Anthony Andrews and John Gielgud, mirrored Waugh’s characters immaculately. The acting in-War and Peace was perfectly good – but no one jumped out of the screen as a Tolstoy original in the flesh. It helps, too, that Brideshead
Revisited was written in English in 1945 – recently enough for nuances of language and plot to be recognisable to viewers 36 years later, with minimal exposition required.
Most crucially, the director, Charles Sturridge, ripped up John Mortimer’s script for Brideshead Revisited and rewrote it. Sturridge incorporated long, original tracts from the book, read out as a voice-over by Jeremy Irons’s Charles Ryder. The big screen version in 2008 was no good because the screenwriters badly rewrote Evelyn Waugh’s impeccable lines. One of those screenwriters, incidentally, was Andrew Davies on a rare off-day.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (with Alec Guinness as Smiley) worked for the same reasons as Brideshead – it was broadcast at great length and adapted not long after the novel was written. Davies’s Pride and Prejudice worked as an adaptation of a short novel, with a humour that transferred – and Colin Firth was exceptional.
Television does some things better than classic books – music and dramatic visuals in particular. But the workings of the mind – the mixture of intellect and imagination – that are fired by reading long, old, classic novels will never be sparked in the same way on screen.