The BBC get in the first volley in the upcoming Dicken’s bicentenary adaptations (it is also the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, Dr Who episode on the Titanic with Dickens anyone?) with Great Expectations. Written by Sarah Phelps and directed by Brian Kirk it is all very atmospheric, with lingering shots of endless, grey-green glasses and lots of dirt and a smothering grease of unease and danger coating every shot.
Young Pip running over the marshes, nearly as scared of his vicious, unpredictable sister as the brutal convict in the marshes, is played by the engaging young actor, Oscar Kennedy. His Pip is quiet and tentative, always aware that his welcome in the forge is conditional, for all his sister boasts of raising him ‘by hand’, but with a good heart. Perfect prey for infant Black Widow Estella to cut her fangs on, under the cobwebby Miss Havisham’s sickly eager guidance.
Gillian Anderson’s performance as Miss Havisham is not going to go short of praise. Pale, mad eyed and distrait, she maunders around Satis House in shabby silk and frayed, teased hair. Younger than most Miss Havisham’s the shadows of beauty hang around her, but she despises it. She tells Pip that she is dead and picks at herself constantly, like she is trying to peel away the skin to let her ghost out.
She is a dreadful creature, spiteful and mean, cruel to her family and crueller to the infant she bought to prune like a bonsai tree into a beautiful, heartless thing. Pathetic too, though. All those years dedicated to revenge, yet she never took it herself. When she was wronged she crawled back into Satis House and dragged it closed around her, her only cruelties practiced spitefully and pettily on litle boys.
Young Estella’s actress, Izzy Meikle-Small, who we will be seeing on screen in 2012 in Snow White and the Huntsman, deserves her share of the kudos. Her performance is more muted than Anderson, but the echoes of Havisham’s madness are in the way her eyes widen eagerly at cruelty and the frozen poise of her hands and still, smooth face. Her perfect posture can’t hid the fact that there is something just broken in her.
We see less of her adult version in this episode, just a brief glimpse of Vanessa Kirby in a very ugly blue dress. Mostly what struck me was how much she looked like Juliet Landeu as Drusilla in Buffy. It was quite odd.
Older Pip, played by Douglas Booth of Worried About the Boy, got more screen time. Booth is a very good-looking young man, distracting so when he is meant to be playing a poor apprentice working his hands to paws in the forge. I don’t expect them to black up his teeth or anything, but he could at least have looked a bit more scruffy. He didn’t even have a smut on his face.
There seemed to be some effort to make Pip a little less of a repellent little toad than he was in the books. Estella shows more interest in him, presumably the BBC felt Pip’s persistent pursuit of a woman who constantly tells him she isn’t interested would come across as more stalker than romantic. It doesn’t altogether work. In good part because they seem to have excised Biddy, the girl that Pip knew he should have loved but didn’t, who helped Joe take care of the comatose Mrs Joe.
Without her, it just looks like Pip took his inheritance and took off – leaving the only person who has ever loved him to struggle alone in the forge and with taking care of his ailing wife. Hardly admirable – although maybe understandable. Hopefully, Pip will send money home to help but it seems unlikely.
For all that though, it was hard to like the show. In part, because I never liked Great Expectations. I studied it at school and I despised Pip, I resented every small advance he gained and cheered his downfalls. My interpretation of the ending veers away from both the original and revised endings, to paint Estella as an unrepentant serial killer who leaves Pip to wallow in his straitened circumstances and takes off to kill people in America. So, the adaptation was always going to have to work hard to win me over.
The other thing is, everyone but Joe is horrible in some way – either physically or morally. It is part of how Dickens writes. Everything is heightened, to almost pantomime levels, including the characters. In Great Expectations it is harder though, because there are few redeeming characters, and they are rarely seen. Pip is the viewpoint character, it is his voice telling the story, and he is a…well, little toad.
