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The shapes we take don't fit the games you play
"Peter had succeeded in getting his pipe to draw, and, with both hands in his trouser-pockets, was observing the actors in the drama with an air of pleased detachment."
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon (1937)
"Well, now you have me. It's that thing called charm. Without it, there is a not particularly personable, slightly skinny gent in an old loose tweed jacket and trousers with a patch on the seat and tortoise-rimmed glasses, pulling on a blunt pipe. With it, there is Leslie Howard."
—Ruth Rankin, "Leslie Howard – Perennial Charmer" (1936)
I still can't believe Busman's Honeymoon was filmed in the UK in 1940 when Leslie Howard was still alive and didn't star him. Every now and then I consider subjecting myself to it because I imagine Robert Newton was an ideal Frank Crutchley and then I remember everything else I have ever read or heard about it and I just re-read the novel.
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon (1937)
"Well, now you have me. It's that thing called charm. Without it, there is a not particularly personable, slightly skinny gent in an old loose tweed jacket and trousers with a patch on the seat and tortoise-rimmed glasses, pulling on a blunt pipe. With it, there is Leslie Howard."
—Ruth Rankin, "Leslie Howard – Perennial Charmer" (1936)
I still can't believe Busman's Honeymoon was filmed in the UK in 1940 when Leslie Howard was still alive and didn't star him. Every now and then I consider subjecting myself to it because I imagine Robert Newton was an ideal Frank Crutchley and then I remember everything else I have ever read or heard about it and I just re-read the novel.
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Why do we continue to get ENDLESS MISS MARPLE ADAPTATIONS and not a single modern Wimsey?????
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Do you have a preferred current casting?
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I hadn't given it much thought before this afternoon! Rewatching Chariots of Fire (1981) after my first vaccine shot made me think of Nigel Havers, but that doesn't help much in 2021. I haven't seen him outside of a supporting role in Pride (2014) and occasional appearances on Tumblr, but I am considering Freddie Fox; he's got the sleek fair hair and he isn't quite conventionally handsome and he's in his thirties by now. (Laurence Fox apparently went full UKIP while I wasn't looking and is out of the running.) Johnny Flynn has a wonderful angular face, but not in the right directions; John Heffernan could get away with the line about having a silly face, but he might actually be good-looking; I'm not sure Edward Hogg, as much as I love his pointiness, would function as a blond. I feel desperately out of touch with current actors, even more so after this past year when I couldn't just drop in and out of theaters. Nobody has impressed me recently as all nerves and nose.
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Oh, that I hadn't heard. I knew there had been a rights issue, but I hadn't known the 1940 film was it. That's inexcusable.
Not that the scripts for the Petherbridge/Walter adaptations were any good whatsofuckingever (I nearly threw the DVD for Gaudy Night across the room), but it would've been nice to have the visuals.
I did appreciate finding out from Petherbridge's blog and memoirs how much he and Walter argued with the BBC as the series went on, but I wish they hadn't had to.
Why do we continue to get ENDLESS MISS MARPLE ADAPTATIONS and not a single modern Wimsey?????
I don't know! I would have to apply myself to the question of a contemporary Wimsey (one of the younger Foxes? They all have odd blond faces), but at this point I do wonder.
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I didn't know about Petherbridge's blog/memoirs, but I'm grateful he and Walter stepped up to the plate and tried.
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It would be like the Tunguska event of AO3.
(Ironically, because of that chameleonism, I'm now wondering about Sheen for Campion.)
I didn't know about Petherbridge's blog/memoirs, but I'm grateful he and Walter stepped up to the plate and tried.
His website has been sufficiently rearranged that I can't find the relevant blog posts anymore, but from his memoir Slim Chances and Unscheduled Appearances (2010):
"In 1985 the BBC were planning twelve episodes of Sayers' mysteries, and the producer, one Michael Chapman, handed me out of the blue three entire novels of which Lord Peter Wimsey was the hero. This might, at first, have seemed to be giving me the advantage over an actor invited to play, say, Hamlet, with nothing but five acts to go on. The three volumes, Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, all new to me, were a delightful weight of reading and went some way to compensate for the fact that I'd never actually met a lord, I mean a real hereditary lord. [. . .]
"Lord Peter's resourceful, distinguished service in the trenches in the First World War (the DSO, followed by a nervous breakdown), the admirable Bunter as his batman, and his subsequent secret work for the Foreign Office, would make him an excellent companion on a desert island, ingenious and practical. His knowledge of literature and his ability to quote from it, his gift for engaging prattle, coupled with his musical talent, almost make the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and eight gramophone records redundant. He might be considered by some castaways to be a luxury item in himself.
"Harriet Vane, the heroine of the Wimsey novels, is an uncommon commoner and, like Sayers, a writer of detective novels. She is as much in love with Peter, however much she tries to deny it, as Dorothy herself. Amid all the sleuthing, it is their story that sings clear and sometimes sweet through the surface hiss of history and through what has become the quaint period detail of the books. It does not seem at all a dated notion, at least whilst one is under Sayers' spell, that if she can only get Harriet to the point of accepting Peter's hand, England, Britain and the world will seem to be a better place. [. . .]
"There is a certain nobility in the actor's special sense of obligation to the integrity of a novelist's plot and characters. Playwrights' heroes are crying out for the actor. Shakespeare's Hamlet and Cleopatra, miraculous though they are, are incomplete on the page. The novel's characters, great and small, are complete as soon as the author lays down his pen. Dramatization only puts them in double jeopardy, first at the hands of the adapter-scriptwriter, who begins to take the living things out of their element; secondly comes the usurping actor, prising the hero off the page and out of the imagination of the reader. This is not to mention the adulterous hands of directors, designers, editors, and all the cooks who might spoil the broth, which was never intended to be broth at all.
"Achieving the 'definitive' Wimsey was sometimes a struggle in the midst of all the approximations and impurities. I must, however, pay tribute to so many felicitous production touches: those wonderful lady dons; a host of supporting character studies, many of them excellent; innumerable design triumphs; a perfect score by Joseph Horovitz, a name to inspire musical confidence; my suits alone, 'shoulders tailored to swooning-point'. Irrespective of these touches, I soon found it necessary to cast myself in the role of purist policeman, insisting that the TV audience, like the reader, should have all the clues. Harriet Walter and I managed to insist on the deciphering business in the last minutes of Have His Carcase; we thought the detail of it was quintessential whodunit stuff and exciting as a cerebral game. More importantly, as soon as I saw the script of the last episode of Gaudy Night, I declared, in league with Harriet, that this was un-actable and that we wouldn't act it unless the proposal to Harriet Vane and her acceptance were not a perfunctory two-line incident halfway through it, but, as in the book, the climactic final sequence.
"On our last day in Oxford, our sympathetic but harried director was off on various quests, our producer was mysteriously in London, whilst Harriet Walter and I found ourselves in one of those curious lumber rooms that always manifest themselves on locations, however elegant, being repositories for everything and anything that must be got out of shot. We were in a room just off the beautiful colonnade of Corpus Christi College in which the proposal was to take place. In amongst a clutter of furniture and rolled-up carpets, we conferred and pored over the novel's immensely long build-up to the proposal and its acceptance, both in Latin. We hastily re-drafted our final exchange, necessarily pithy and all of it in English. Michael Simpson would breeze in at junctures, casting doubts and leaving counter-suggestions, buzz off again as the clock ticked nearer to the moment that afternoon when we should have to commit our fresh dialogue to memory, rehearse it and get it in the can. All of Sayers' marvellously photogenic stuff on the roof of the Radcliffe Camera was lost (too expensive, I suppose), the winking traffic lights, the agonizingly romantic stretching of the dénouement, which I'd loved on first reading but afterwards found emotionally and philosophically convoluted, as exotic and indulgent as an overplanted hothouse. We didn't manage to get in everything we wanted to and, when it came to it, the length of the colonnade, down which we strolled, dictated the pace and essence of the scene. The scene was about walking on eggshells, culminating in the golden egg.
"Retrospectively, I can understand Michael Chapman's urge to get out the secateurs and prune things a bit, but it was Gaudy Night that suffered most at his hands. He never tired of proclaiming that the first thing he did when taking on the project (which had already been developed to some degree by someone else) was to reduce Gaudy Night from four episodes to three, even though it is the longest and densest of the three novels we adapted and arguably the best. In a ridiculous bid not to give the ending away, the character of the culprit was crudely marginalized, although the actress Lavinia Bertram does very well indeed with what there is.
"It was the idea of being involved with a ladies' college for several weeks that set our producer's teeth on edge and he made sure we didn't film at Somerville College (Sayers' alma mater); Corpus Christi, founded in 1517, is, of course, one of the 'ancient', traditionally male colleges. Yet the female cast was Gaudy Night's great strength. We had a very good ensemble of lady dons; they held a reunion or two for a time, one of which I was invited to [. . .] They all made up, to some degree, for the plot being oversimplified.
"I understood Harriet Walter becoming distressed at one point and insisting that, even in the face of the greatest aristocratic detective, she might be permitted to have some clues of her own, even if they must, perforce, be at the cost of Peter's unparalleled prowess. What I liked most about Harriet was her willingness to engage in both serious discussion and witty badinage in the muddiest of car location car parks at 6:30 a.m. Those lovely deserted coastal shots in Have His Carcase were only possible very late the season when all the holidaymakers had left. Invariably we were wearing thermal underwear and waiting for the sun to emerge for a few minutes so we could capture a scene between clouds. I was rarely bored waiting and, of course, on the screen it all looks balmy and beautiful, like an old LMS railway poster come to sun-kissed life.
"I do not forgive myself in that second adaptation for merely complaining and actually submitting to the appalling 'beef-up Bunter' idea that came from God knows where, but suddenly arrived ready-scripted one day. Richard Morant's Bunter, rather than Wimsey, was to ride the horse bareback over the sands at Wilvercombe. I know there are lots of people who love the books, or have come to know them well, through the television series, and so it may be worth explaining this particularly wrong-headed corruption of the original for those aficionados. There is a pivotal moment on the sands with Wimsey and the horse when Harriet suddenly sees Peter as the archetypal shining knight:
"'Harriet was silent. She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something god-like about him. He could control a horse.'
"We gave absolutely no trace of this crucial turning point in Harriet's perception of Peter.
"It was suggested by the director Chris Hodson, fibbing to me in a hotel corridor in the West Country, where I challenged him about the script, that, as I had only the tamest equestrian experience, I would not like the alternative – to be exposed to ridicule on the public beach astride a mechanical hobby horse when filming the close shots. I assumed, rightly, that it was standard practice to have bareback riding in long shot done by an expert stunt rider. I did have a previous experience one early misty morning, in the filming of M. R. James' The Ash Tree, of seeing from a distance my stuntman thrown by a horse and, as the creature was being brought back, hearing the director's voice clearly in the still, damp air say, 'Don't tell Edward.' In my scene that evening on the same horse, I had to ride past some Elizabethan windows carrying a flaming torch whilst banging with a stick on the shutters. I was foolhardy enough to do it out of sheer masculine pride. The horse behaved perfectly and I felt like a hero in a costume drama, which is what I was supposed to be.
"When our stuntman in Have His Carcase had completed the long beach ride in long shot and the sands were deserted, Richard, wearing a raincoat and apparently no better qualified than I, mounted a mechanical hobby horse for the close shot. In order to look like a convincing shining knight, I would have mounted that contraption on the beach at Blackpool on August Bank Holiday amongst jeering crowds (who could have been digitally removed in post production). What I suppose I couldn't ultimately bring myself to do in this instance was dig in my heels and snatch back Wimsey's rightful heroic sequence from my colleague. In a funny way I was too proud to do that, because it would have felt like an actor's pettiness. I did insist, however, that Bunter and I should toss a coin to see who would undertake the ride down the beach, so there should be no doubt that both characters were capable. I then concentrated on somehow keeping my heroic credentials in place during the scene of waiting for Bunter to appear. The line, 'There rides the man who fills my hot-water bottle and cooks like Escoffier', is my own creation – no credit or extra fee for 'additional dialogue', mind you. My advice to anyone in the same situation would be: bugger all that, phone the agent, argue artistic differences, defend the original author's intentions, walk out and speak to the press (good publicity), come to blows if necessary, be unpopular, but ride that bloody horse!
"By the time we got to the third book and the proposal, I decided that we had enough artistic credit in the bank and I was ready to fight for Peter and Harriet's, and Dorothy's, just deserts. By then I felt we had achieved the status of shaman, so second nature to us was it to enter into that waking trance in which we took on the personalities of our hero and heroine, abetted by Dorothy, who had provided three thick books of delightful biography for us to examine for atmosphere and evidence."
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I highly recommend Edward Petherbridge's memoir.
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Indeed.
Petherbridge is a lovely actor. And smart!
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I really like the idea of Desert Island Detectives.
Petherbridge is a lovely actor. And smart!
"As I began to work on Newman Noggs, perhaps I realized he too was a waif, a middle-aged one, who had lost his status as a gentleman and all hope of redemption. The sensations at the heart of his designedly anonymous life, I instinctively attempted to imagine in the long solitary hours he spent on his office stool and in his garret, the lonely limping errands across London, delivering letters or parcels for Ralph, with the little detours through familiar swing doors into public houses for a shot of anaesthetic. As soon as he meets Nicholas, of course, he finds a secret focus, if only out of gratitude to Nicholas's father, the man who once did him 'a kindness when there was no hope of return.' But the necessary ground is the lost cause that Noggs himself and everyone else assumes he has become, out of which the glimmers of righteous anger appear and the covert, growing determination, in whatever small ways possible, to do the right thing by Nicholas."
I'm sure it would drive me up the wall if I were trying to review his performances, but I enjoy reading someone who can do their own criticism:
"I had reasons, literally very close to home, for wanting to play Bennett's contrasting ultra-ordinary Arthur Dodsworth [in Office Suite], confined in his 'castle', which was about to be stormed by Patricia Routledge's Miss Prothero. Dodsworth is a widower, the newly retired erstwhile head of Credit and Settlement in a Yorkshire firm, a mild-mannered, modest, lower middle-class pensioner 'branching out' into pottery classes. Happily, here is a perfect and unexpected link, such as is manna from heaven to the writer of a discursive memoir! Not only had I been learning King Lear's lines, I had been defining him and the Fool in clay at my pottery classes. I could show you three versions. All Arthur Dodsworth has to show for his classes is an ashtray. [. . .]
"Kemp, mobile to mobile, was saying, 'Can I do anything to help? Can I fix you a dialect coach?' 'No,' I replied, 'This is the assumed voice, the actor's voice that I am speaking to you in now; as Arthur Dodsworth I will be speaking my native Yorkshire vernacular – a music as familiar to me as "songs my mother taught me".'
"But, there was a curious hitch. As I sat in the Chichester rehearsal room in Arthur Dodsworth's fireside chair, conscious that I was, at seventy, a little too old for the part, and about to turn seventy-one, I had the curious sensation that I was closer to my seventeenth birthday and my boyhood home, number 71 Pembroke Street, than my 71st birthday. You may laugh, but this was by no means a helpful thing for my Dodsworth. Patricia was the thing itself, had created her part for television nearly thirty years before and seemed to have matured into it, as authentic in the role now as a vintage wine in one of those venerable bottles. Rehearsing Bennett with her for the first few days was like rehearsing the Ten Commandments with Moses. I was in constant danger of being caught out dancing round the golden calf of waywardness. I felt I understood Arthur Dodsworth; I knew him, knew the lines already (almost) and the man completely, but I couldn't feel like the sedentary, bowls-once-a-week Arthur at all to begin with, though I could sound precisely like him. Even our mutual penchant for pottery classes didn't help.
"Strange, even ludicrous as it may seem, the classes I felt more affinity with and, indeed, which threatened to manifest themselves at any moment, were the first movement classes I'd attended at Bradford's Theatre School; I felt at risk of lifting like an autumn leaf off my fireside chair or turning my hand in an elegant eighteenth-century manner or lapsing into some posture learnt in my Friday morning ballet classes of over fifty years ago. [. . .] The fact is that the legacy of my early training is physical as well as vocal – perhaps predominantly physical – and I had never seen myself as settled into that dreaded category, 'the character actor'. Arthur Dodsworth was not, as they say, a very physical person and I realize now that most of the 'character' parts I have played required something of the deft clown. Even the romantic hero Wimsey (you see we have got back to him) referred to himself as a comedian, a light comedian. There's Newman Noggs, the victim of circumstance, who, chameleon-like, must adapt or conceal himself and his feelings to survive, continually 'in his cups' for anaesthetic, but still capable of girding up what is left of his loins when the Right must be fought for. Or there's the old Restoration lecher and lawyer, Coupler, in The Relapse, who, raddled though he may be, is still the duplicitous, mercurial fixer he has always been, with an eye and a groping hand for the gallant young bucks. I was warring against a whole careerful of light-on-their-feet operators, including Cyrano de Bergerac and Molière's Alceste."
(He is finally able to become "complacent" enough for Arthur when he realizes the character's non-adaptive qualities are the key to the entire play and is justifiably proud of himself.)