Time shifts in PBS’S Birdsong a bit wearying

Scenes of war are more interesting than the love scenes

Fans of PBS’S Masterpiece Classic presentations will want to tune in today and April 29 for the two-part production of Birdsong. Both parts begin at 9 p.m. each day and last 90 minutes.

Masterpiece’s winter and spring season has been a mixed buffet. It began in December with the delicious encore of Downton Abbey’s Season 1, followed by the equally satisfying Season 2 in January and February.

Sherlock and The Old Curiosity Shop proved entertaining, while April’s Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, although filling, again showed how difficult it is to translate the full savory richness of Dickens to the small screen.

Now we come to Birdsong, an adaptation of English author Sebastian Faulk’s acclaimed bestselling novel of the same name about lovers and World War I. It’s an uneven experience about the numbing effects of forbidden love and brutalizing war.

Eddie Redmayne ( My Week With Marilyn, The Pillars of the Earth) portrays Lt. Stephen Wraysford, whose prewar affair with the married Isabelle Azaire (Clemence Poesy, Harry Potter) has an enduring effect on him as he fights in the trenches of the Western Front.

Jumping from 1910 to 1916, we find Stephen in something resembling a stupor in the trenches of northern France. He seems barely cognizant of the death and destruction all around him. It is a constant and oppressive presence.

He has withdrawn into his own world and fixated on his sketches and his deck of cards. Why? Well, he’s mooning over the memory of his lost love, Isabelle.

His memories of that magical and ardor-filled summer in Amiens six years before, when he was 20, consume him.

The lovers shared stolen moments of erotic passion until Isabelle worked up the courage to leave her much older and abusive husband, Rene (Laurent Lafitte).

The couple then shared a carefree existence that seemed to make up for a lifetime of loneliness and isolation for Stephen.

But their idyllic life was cut short when one day Isabelle left without explanation. Stephen was distraught then and remains so six years later on the front lines.

The narrative switches frequently between the present and the past in an attempt to inform us about Stephen’s psychological isolation.

The early scenes in the trenches, and later during the Battle of the Somme, are more satisfying than those between the younger lovers.

In the war scenes, Stephen at least has a number of surrounding players with which to interact.

The early scenes between Stephen and Isabelle linger far too long on the pregnant silences between them as their eyes meet or their fingers touch — the visually delicate tableaux of a couple silently exploring the forbidden.

Their growing infatuation is firmly established long before they clandestinely slip into an unoccupied bedroom to consummate their unspoken desires.

Providing human and humane balance to Stephen in the trenches is tunneler Jack Firebrace (Joseph Mawle) whose mind is also elsewhere — back home with his wife and young son who is ill with diphtheria.

It is Firebrace who saves Stephen when he realizes the lieutenant, although wounded and left among those awaiting burial, is not dead.

Also along for emotional counterpoint is Stephen’s bomb shelter roomie, Capt. Michael Weir (Richard Madden, Robb Stark in Game of Thrones). It is through Weir and his fate that the viewer sees the vagaries and frequently shocking irony of war.

The frequent switching of the timelines — a device more easily handled in the novel — will irritate some viewers and make others believe they have missed some vital snippet of information needed to explain the action.

They haven’t. This is just one of those productions that skips between past and present and eventually gets the entire tale told to those with the patience to stick it out.

All of that said, Birdsong’s three hours in two parts are about 30 minutes too long. The production seems padded.

Still, the scenery (Hungary stands in for northern France) is lush, the acting more than adequate and the emotions totally satisfying.

And almost any Masterpiece is better than no Masterpiece at all.

Next up: Sherlock Series 2 begins May 6.