TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82brides

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                                                                                January 18, 1982 

Brideshead Revisited

Memories of a Golden Past

A lavish British series mirrors Evelyn Waugh, faults and all


BRIDESHEAD REVISITED PBS, beginning Jan. 18, 8 p.m., E.S.T. It
is an odd book by one of the century's oddest writers, and even
he had serious reservations about it. "I reread Brideshead and
was appalled," he wrote Graham Greene in 1950, five years after
publication. But Brideshead Revisited, overwritten and
underplotted, is and probably will remain Evelyn Waugh's
best-known and most popular novel, a lush, sentimental tribute
to Catholicism and to the period between the wars that Waugh
regarded as the last gorgeous days of the British aristocracy.
Now, in this lavish and beautiful eleven-part series from
Britain's Granada Television, U.S. viewers will be able to see
why a book so often derided is yet so often loved.

Probably never before, in fact, has a novel been so faithfully
adapted. John Mortimer's script preserves big chunks of Waugh's
narrative prose in addition to his dialogue. "We went for the
book whole," says Producer Derek Granger. "We were true to its
faults as well as its virtues, but the faults--the
overluxuriance, for instance--are also rather appealing. Waugh
wrote it during a very bleak period of World War II, and he
looked back to his days in Oxford as golden, halcyon."  The most
expensive TV production ever to come from Britain (about $9.9
million), Brideshead Revisited has a cast that includes John
Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Mona Washbourne, Jeremy
Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick. Not to mention, of
course, that wonderful baroque pile called Castle Howard, which
may indeed be the very house the author saw in his mind when he
described the fictional Brideshead, first glimpsed on a
cloudless day in June, "prone in the sunlight, gray and gold
amid a screen of boskage."

The young man who does the glimpsing is Brideshead's narrator,
Charles Ryder (Irons), who finds his army unit bivouacked by
coincidence on the grounds he knows so well. He had been
introduced to the house years earlier by one of its inhabitants.
Sebastian Flyte (Andrews), an Oxford classmate renowned for "his
beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of
behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds."  In the flashbacks
arising from Ryder's bittersweet memories, Sebastian gives long,
champagne-inspired lunches in his rooms and, in an extravagant
undergraduate fantasy, carries with him everywhere a large Teddy
bear named Aloysius. Charles and Sebastian form a strong
attachment and probably--although the relationship is kept
behind its own screen of boskage in both the book and the
series--become lovers.

Ryder soon falls in love with the entire Flyte family and
becomes for a time almost an adopted son. His own widowed father
(Gielgud) is comically austere in his affections; when his son
returns to their London home after 15 months, he looks up in
unhappy surprise and says, "Oh, dear."  The Flytes, by contrast,
are warm and charming. Their only fault, in Charles'
conventional Anglican eyes, is their obsession with their
exotic, un-English Catholic religion.

Propelled by piety, Lady Marchmain (Bloom) tries to mold
everyone into goodness. Therein lies much of the family tragedy.
Lord Marchmain (Olivier), his love turned to hatred, has gone
into self- imposed exile in Venice; Sebastian becomes a doomed
and hopeless alcoholic. "Poor Mummy," he says, when he later
learns of her death. "She was a true femme fatale. She killed
with a touch."  Sebastian's beautiful sister Julia (Quick)
meantime married a crass politician, and Charles, who has become
a painter, enters into an unhappy marriage of his own. Ten years
later, the two of them meet again on an ocean liner, and Charles
loves the sister as he did the brother-- on-camera this time.
Summing up 12 1/2 hours, Bloom jokingly remarks, "Boy meets boy.
Boy loses boy. Boy finds girl. Girl dumps boy. Boys goes off
alone."

At the beginning, Charles' enchantment with Sebastian and the
Marchmains' way of life is infectious, and the first several
hours of Brideshead are a glorious feast--even better, no doubt,
than those served up in Sebastian's rooms at Christ Church
college. The acting is scrupulous. Gielgud's scenes with Irons
in the Ryder dining room in London are small comic masterpieces
of timing and nuance. Olivier's grand scenes come at the end,
when Lord Marchmain comes home to die at Brideshead.

The trouble, for which Waugh is really responsible, comes after
Sebastian takes up a drunkard's residence in the remoteness of
North Africa. When he leaves--for the last several hours, he is
never seen--he takes with him the story's focal point and
vitality. Like many narrators, Charles is a reactor, someone who
responds to people more interesting than himself. When he is
forced to stand in the spotlight, he does not know what to do,
and therefore does nothing.

"I think Charles might have had a little more glamour," Waugh's
friend Nancy Mitford delicately complained to him when he sent
her an advance copy of the book. Mitford saw the point of
making the narrator "dim," but asked, "Would Julie and her
brother and her sister all be in love with him if he was?"
Irons asked himself the same question when he was assigned the
role. "Is this character going to bore the audience terribly?"
he wondered. "He certainly bores the pants off me."

One solution considered during the shooting was to depart from
Waugh and bring Sebastian back into the story. Charles
Sturridge, who succeeded Michael Lindsay-Hogg as director and
is responsible for most of what appears onscreen, did bring
Sebastian back in a test scene that showed him in North Africa
in the '30s, but the scene was discarded in editing. Still, the
production's fidelity to Waugh is something viewers can respect.
Several hours of brilliance are worth a couple of tedium. Once
hooked, it is doubtful that many people will give up on the
series. That, in any event, was the experience in Britain, where
the last episode ran Dec. 22. Though it never won top ratings,
the program did score a solid hit with the well-off and educated
viewers prized by advertisers, and there was something of a
Brideshead cult. Restaurants and theater owners complained of
lack of business on Brideshead Tuesdays, and Anglophiles as far
away as Peking begged for TV cassettes. Costume parties were
built around the show, and pretty Sebastian look-alikes were
spotted accompanying Teddy bears into smart discos.

How would Waugh, who died in 1966, have liked it?  Very much,
if the opinion of his son Auberon, who is also a writer, is any
indication. "It's the best bit of television I've ever seen,"
he says. "It is tremendously enjoyable, incredibly true to the
novel."  Evelyn Waugh never had much affection for Americans or
for television, however, and he probably would have had no more
than a harrumph of derision for the newest U.S. edition of the
book, which bills itself as a "companion to the PBS television
series."

--By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Jef McAllister/London