Please note: This review was written in September 2000 and has been slightly revised since.
BBC 2000. Dir. Andy Wilson; prod. Estelle Daniel; scr. Malcolm McKay (from the novels by Mervyn Peake). With Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Steerpike), Christopher Lee (Flay), Celia Imrie (Gertrude), John Sessions (Prunesquallor), Neve McIntosh (Fuchsia), Warren Mitchell (Barquentine), Fiona Shaw (Irma), June Brown (Nannie Slagg), Stephen Fry (Bellgrove), Ian Richardson (Lord Groan), Richard Griffiths (Swelter), Cameron Powrie (Titus at 12), Andrew Robertson (Titus at 17), Zoe Wanamaker (Clarice), Lynsey Baxter (Cora), et al.
by G.M. Baxter (e-mail: gmbaxter@hotmail.com)
"She seemed too much alive - alive in a different sense from the glittering and icy vitality of her companion -
too much alive in the way that love like an earthquake or some natural and sinless force, is incompatible with a neat and formal world. However quietly she sat back in her chair, her black hair about her shoulders, she was potentially disruptive." Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast(Chapter 56; the image, of Jonathan Rhys Meyers as
Steerpike, is the cover of the 1999 Vintage edition).
Several years ago, I saw a reproduction of one of Mervyn Peake's illustrated manuscript pages for Titus Groan. The writing was squashed to the side by a large pencil drawing of a boy and a girl. The boy made me think of a tidier version of the very young Johnny Rotten, clearly devious yet weirdly appealing; the girl, who seemed to be off in some lost world, was all thick black hair and big distant eyes and full sensuous mouth: she made me think of Antoinette in Jean Rhys's tale of the mad wife in Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea. The picture was simply titled "Steerpike and Fuchsia."
Finally reading the Gormenghast novels was like a revelation to me; Peake's prose is mesmerizing (just to pull a phrase out of the air, I think of Irma dashing from the room "in a typhoon of black silk" to moan upstairs after the sight of Steerpike with his shirt off). I hate the sort of ghost story where the ghost turns out to be curtains but despite the Gothic trappings in these novels, I like their avoidance of the supernatural, because real discipline is needed to maintain atmosphere. And the Gothic trappings are there: the novels are considerably more gloomy in texture and imagery than the series (there's more black in the wardrobe descriptions than in the entire closets of the Addams Family), though Peake is tweaking conventional Gothicism quite hard. This post-Second World War trilogy is a political allegory for the twentieth century and a meditation on the nature of love, set in an ancient city-state crumbling under its rigid feudal system with its harsh laws and hollow rituals: a beautiful yet rotting artifact, ripe for the sort of rebellion which replaces one evil with another. (It's like one of those stagnant worlds run by malfunctioning computers programmed by the Old Ones in the first Star Trek: Captain Kirk would have violated the Prime Directive in no time here).
Director Andy Wilson was a member of Circus Archaos in the 1980s (this was a sort of heavy metal circus with clowns on motorbikes wielding buzzsaws and blowtorches) and he brings a lot of that anarchic energy to the look of this adaptation: it's opulent, but never pretty, and cgi effects and bluescreening are used only where necessary, so that the actors are mainly filmed actually reacting to each other. The active camerawork suggests both the vivid individualism of these characters and the ways in which they are all rendered tiny and inconsequential by the sheer weight of Gormenghast Castle and all its trappings. The various point of view shots in the christening scene, and the claustrophobia of the final scenes (in rooms flooded almost to their ceilings) are just a couple of particularly impressive examples. The depth of detail is ravishing; repeated viewings let you notice all sorts of details in decor and influences that might have slipped by earlier, from an embroidery detail on a costume to an incongruous portrait on a wall. This is a brighter world than Peake's novels suggest, but those novels have the precise attention to colour you'd expect from a painter, and the design of this film amplifies that sense. Christopher Hobbs' set designs, Odile Dicks-Mireaux's costumes and Richard Rodney Bennett's orchestral score (with choral pieces by John Tavener), all create a parallel universe in which every detail is recognizable, yet no defined setting is suggested, in place or time. People speak in a modern way while performing ancient rituals. Some parts of the castle have been shrouded in dust for centuries; others have sinks with taps or electric lamps.
The relatively short length of this adaptation (only four hours; Oliver Twist is a much shorter text but a longer adaptation by at least a couple of hours) and budget restrictions mean a certain visual shorthand often has to suggest the more elaborate elements of Peake's novels. Master Chalk (a genuine albino rook) comes to represent Gertrude's affinity with birds; the cats never seem numerous enough so their inappropriate placement (for example in the birthing bed) suggests her feline fixation. The reveries at the breakfast become mental catch phrases, from Fuchsia's plaintive "I want my daddy!" to Irma's "I must get a man! a man! a man!" to the twins' "We want our thrones!" (though this actually works quite well on film), and the sheer number and variety of rituals can only be hinted at. A lot of the novels'subtlety and complexity are lost, but the circularity of the story retains its impact: it starts and ends with a 17-year-old boy escaping an existence he abhors.\
The acting is terrific. One of the great strengths of this adaptation is that the actors mostly do overact and yet manage to find the note of humanity in their characters. Peake reveals more about his characters through their thoughts than their actions. They are eccentric forces of nature (and misguided nurture), but there are those precise grace notes that make most of them (not all) accessibly human. Since long reflective voice-overs can be pretty boring, the actors have to both aim for outrageousness and find those grace notes in their physical performance: I'm thinking of Celia Imrie's stolid, apparently callous Gertrude, unable to suppress a tear at the news of Fuchsia's death, also John Sessions' perpetually sprightly Prunesquallor abruptly dropping his mask of glee and insisting to Fuchsia that she's not wicked when she claims to feel nothing at Nannie's death. But I'm also thinking of Jonathan Rhys Meyers' fearlessly ugly howl of anguish as he chokes down sobs against his fist: his Steerpike's brief revelation that maybe Fuchsia's rejection has wounded more than his ambition.
These nuances allow us to realize how perceptively Peake drew these characters in the first place. Maybe Gertrude retreats to her cats and birds not because she resents her children, but as a way of diverting her sentiments from them, since they belong to Gormenghast and the Line more than to her. Maybe Prunesquallor has to maintain his levity and brightness to keep his sanity in a place where he can't speak his mind. The characters who can't wear masks (Flay and Fuchsia, in particular) suffer for it.
Christopher Lee's Flay is magnificent. He suggests someone who's had a long hard life of rigid duty, in his shabby dusty attire and unkempt hair, his awkward walk and halting speech. Yet he's not Barquentine bullying everyone through the tedious rituals; his loyalty is not so much to Gormenghast as a concept but to the Groan family, whom he loves. Neve McIntosh as Fuchsia has one of the toughest jobs. Fuchsia dies in her early 30s, but in a way she never comes out of her storybook attic and her book of Romantic Tales (with its illustration, so typical of children's books, of a dragon-slaying prince who looks very much like a child himself). Consequently, she flings herself wholeheartedly into the moment, crying I am Me!, twirling about in the rain, ultimately flinging herself off her balcony: Juliet with no Romeo waiting. She's always waiting; the problem is she has no idea what for. No one's told her the facts of life. McIntosh finds her note in physical exaggeration: Fuchsia grows increasingly unhappy as her ever more elaborate gowns and jewels define her as a Royal Person, and her wide-open eyes under amazing eyebrows and that expressively trembling mouth suggest the passage from youthful wildness to almost hysterical frustration. (She's actually more pathetic than Irma Prunesquallor, who gets a wonderfully comic turn from the gifted and actually very sensuous Fiona Shaw: see her performance in Mountains of the Moon as Mrs. Burton for proof! Irma is grotesque but she knows what she wants, a man, and by George, she gets one; she even has the insight to realize that despite the allure of young Steerpike, Professor Bellgrove is much more in her league and range, and Stephen Fry makes his awkward loneliness both comical and touching. He's also very good in the scenes with the young actors who play Titus as a schoolboy, and who are remarkably similar in appearance.)
The characters are essentially as they are in the novels, with the notable exception of Steerpike, one of the 20th century's great literary villains: he's as versatile as Martha Stewart and as ambitious as Shakespeare's Richard III, to whom he owes a lot. The cruelty (even to quite harmless people), ruthless ambition, and devious manipulation are still there, but the motives are more ambiguous. Peake's character is an enigma: he's only been in the kitchen a month when he escapes, and who knows where he came from before? His motives are also consistently clear, and increasingly cold. While he's never really sympathetic, he is human, and I do find poignant the moment, shortly before his death, when he empties his pockets and combs his hair. In the series, his background is more defined: he was born in a mean little room overlooking the dungeons, and sent to the kitchens at six. Peake's Steerpike is odd-looking, even unattractive (short sandy hair, reddish eyes, hunched shoulders), so that Fuchsia is drawn to his youth and vitality, not to his looks. Rhys Meyers has a lean young rock star glamour; it's ironic to watch McIntosh reacting to him very much as Peake's Fuchsia does. (Steerpike in the text is also much more badly disfigured in the fire when he kills Barquentine, and earlier in the story: here, only half his face is horribly scarred and kept hidden by a mask that makes him look from one side slightly like Billy Corgan.) The film Steerpike is more a creature of brilliant improvisation, instinct and intuition than careful method, and Rhys Meyers, a charismatic performer, uses his flexible voice and face and body to great advantage. Peake's Steerpike is a control freak from the outset, contemptuous of the dust and clutter around him ("he hated untidiness as he hated love"). Rhys Meyers makes this rigidity something Steerpike acquires as his power grows; it is signalled in the flattening of his speech, the increasing constriction of his uniform, and the taming back of his long hair. But eventually he explodes, with a vengeance, and that's his character note: he's much more the vindictive antagonist than the force of evil threatening Gormenghast. And certainly, 11 years in Swelter's kitchen, then 17 years being misnamed everything but Sharkbait (I'm sure Barquentine thought of this at some point, though), poked in the stomach to ensure attention to that wretched ritual book, and perpetually taunted as kitchen scum, could lead to fairly severe vengefulness. (This, however, foregrounds the social criticism in this adaptation; the rot in Gormenghast comes both from its meaningless rituals and its calcified heirarchical class system.) Steerpike here is the dangerously fascinating archetype for whatever the current lost generations might be, and yet a very human monster, for all that.
Gormenghast the series is pretty faithful to the story arc of the text and this actually can be a problem. The plot-driven script is fast-paced and episodic; there's little connective tissue to suggest the quite long passage of time. And except for a succession of actors playing Titus, the growth of Flay's beard and the deterioration of Cora/Clarice in prison, no one really seems to age. This is especially apparent with Steerpike and Fuchsia, who are supposed to go from mid-teens to early 30s. Also, the structure of the script means that the first three episodes are mostly punctuated with howlingly comic scenes (the library burning, the breakfast, the death of the headmaster, Irma's soiree) while the fourth gives over to grand high emotion and suspense and tragedy in a dizzying change of pace. One serious continuity problem is in the wild girl subplot (which is a problem anyway): Keda's back story is eliminated; she just comes on as a wet nurse, already pregnant, and gives birth during the earling, which makes her gestation period roughly a year. More could have been done with the Titus/Fuchsia relationship since his principal motivation for taking up arms eventually is that she's been hurt. Despite the appealing chemistry of their scenes (and it was a brave choice to stick to the text here and not provide the almost obligatory sex scene between these two attractive people), the Steerpike/Fuchsia relationship seems far too intermittent (Peake has him carefully orchestrate his way into her confidence through several meetings and conversations), so that her rejection actually seems capricious (he also pushes her considerably more forcefully in the novel before the red-room scene). Finally, I will be very happy when this is released in North America on video, so I can watch it in one go, without commercials, to see what might have been snipped to accommodate underarm deodorant and microwave snacks (for example, when does Fuchsia acquire the rose she takes out of her storybook?).
Relatively few scenes are pure invention, though some are shifted around. Both Fuchsia's fall from the cliff and Titus' rudeness in the classroom are set later, when their relationships with Steerpike are more established. The latter episode leads to an effective confrontation between Titus and Steerpike in the Master of Ritual's office, and then to an argument between Titus and Fuchsia: here, Titus explicitly insults Steerpike's disfigurement, which is undeniably cruel, but which really underlines the mutual jealousy the brother and sister feel. One of the most jarring, and powerful, invented scenes occurs near the end, when Steerpike returns to Fuchsia's attic to claim sanctuary, no longer a boy at (however manipulative) play, but a fugitive in desperate need, no longer a pretend rebel/adventurer, but a real traitor. He's Richard of Gloucester wooing Lady Anne over the graves of the loved ones he murdered, only she does drive the knife in and he's reduced to crawling on his knees to beg her not to summon the guards. At first, I found Fuchsia awful in this, but it's yet another instance of just how much she has been damaged by isolation and a lack of love, and the strongest proof that he has really failed to recognize this.
I think the series would have most resonance for people who know the novels; I suspect parts of it would beg too many questions otherwise (especially about the nature of Gormenghast's Byzantine social machinery and just how it wields such power), but could be wrong on that score. I also feel this might develop a strong cult following, brilliant challenge to conventional costume drama that it is. Gormenghast is a vigorous and moving meditation on the vulnerability and necessity of love, even in a world whose structures and designs seem only to crush it.
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Copyright 2000-04 by Gisèle Baxter. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Last updated 2 August 2003 by G.M. Baxter.