Evelyn Waugh's ‘Decline and Fall' comes to TV
In 1928, when Evelyn Waugh published his first novel, the satirical “Decline and Fall,” there was no television to speak of. (Books were like television once, culturally speaking, if you can believe it.) But his work, also including the novels “Brideshead Revisited” and “Scoop,” is very adaptable to the screen, with its vivid characters, colorful settings and made-for-speaking dialogue. Plus, it has the bonus of satisfying our undying taste for British period pieces.
New to America this week via the Acorn TV streaming service is a new three-part BBC adaptation of “Decline and Fall” with a cast that notably features Eva Longoria and David Suchet, who played Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot for many years. Screenwriter James Wood, who co-created the ecclesiastical urban sitcom “Rev.,” and director Guillem Morales have made from Waugh’s text something both lively and leisurely, suitable to the author’s brand of antic, deadpan comedy.
Wood has taken almost all his material from the page, pruning and shaping without violating the original’s form, adding in incidental exchanges and bits of business that for the most part build upon rather than kill Waugh’s own jokes. If he sets off (literal) fireworks the original author left unlighted, because that is what the screen likes, Waugh at least put them there.
Jack Whitehall plays passive hero Paul Pennyfeather, a divinity student expelled from Oxford for reasons beyond his control (his clothes were removed by rowdies) and forced to work.
And so he is off to Wales, to a bottom-of-the-barrel academy run by Dr. Fagan (Suchet), who greets his new employee, saying, “I’ve been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters into it unless he has some very good reasons he is anxious to conceal.”
Here Pennyfeather encounters fellow teachers Grimes (Douglas Hodge), who drinks and has a wooden leg, and Prendergast (Vincent Franklin), who frets and wears a wig.
Stephen Graham is the dissembling Philbrick, ostensibly a butler, but perhaps a criminal, or a novelist. Longoria plays Margot Beste-Chetwynde, the glamorous Latin American mother of one of Pennyfeather’s students, who will carry the teacher away from school and land him in the soup.
Most pleasant perhaps is the sense that there is a kind of order even in a chaotic world, a force that brings these characters together to their benefit, though much might be suffered along the way.