The Stage

Look Who’s Talking - Getting his house in order - Andrew Davies

Published Wednesday 23 March 2005 at 16:30 by Rob Driscoll

King of the adapters Andrew Davies talks about tackling his biggest project to date - BBC1’s forthcoming epic 16-part serial of Bleak House - and admits Dickens’ labyrinthine plotting has almost got the better of him.

He has been dubbed the prince of period adaptations, thanks to ratings grabbing successes like Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda and Doctor Zhivago.

But screenwriter Andrew Davies insists he is just as happy transferring more contemporary fiction to the small screen - and often has done, notably with two Kingsley Amis novels, The Old Devils and Take a Girl Like You, plus the masterful political black comedy House of Cards and its two sequels. He also contributed to the two Bridget Jones movies.

Most recently, he brought another modern day gem, Falling, to the screen. Based on the novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard, in many ways it was a boldly original piece of drama for ITV1, favoured home of two-part cop thrillers.

“It was basically a love story between two people in later life, beautifully played by Penelope Wilton and Michael Kitchen,” says Davies. “But it was a love story with a twist. What I hate about a lot of TV drama right now, though, are these thrillers with masses and masses of plot twists. What I prefer is something that gets you deep into the characters and how their relationship works. Ultimately, with Falling, I wanted to keep the audience open-minded, hoping this romance would work out. We’d all like to believe in the possibility of love, especially as the years go by.”

Falling was the latest of Davies’ conveyer belt workload, which never seems to diminish, even for a man in his late sixties. His latest project, returning to the classics, has been fashioning the screenplay for Bleak House - surprisingly, his first-ever Dickens adaptation - for BBC1’s much-mooted, 16-part serial destined for a twice-weekly, post-EastEnders slot in the autumn. And his next job will be adapting Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, set in the eighties, for BBC2.

When it comes to period dramas, Davies is generally regarded as the master. His 1994 adaptation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch seemed to bring literary costume romps back into favour and paved the way for his takes on Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Vanity Fair, plus two lesser-known Anthony Trollope novels, The Way We Live Now and He Knew He was Right. Then of course there was his controversial adaptation of bodice-ripper Tipping the Velvet.

But adapting Bleak House has been a very different kettle of fish for Davies. Filming is already underway on the ambitious project - the first TV costume drama to be shot in the high definition digital format. The sprawling cast includes former X-Files star Gillian Anderson, Alun Armstrong, Charlie Brooks, Warren Clarke, Pauline Collins, Philip Davis, Charles Dance, Matthew Kelly, Alistair McGowan, Nathaniel Parker, Hugo Speer, Liza Tarbuck, Johnny Vegas and Timothy West.

This is the first adaptation of Bleak House since the much-praised 1985 BBC version, which starred Diana Rigg. For Davies, adapting the novel about injustices of the 19th century English legal system has been a mixed blessing.

“On the plus side, Dickens gives you such strong lines of dialogue and there are all these wonderful, grotesque characters you can really run with,” says Cardiff-born Davies.

“But plot-wise it’s a nightmare, because it is so convoluted and keeps spinning off into sub-plots. Your main concern is to keep focused on the central plot, that the whole audience can follow. In truth, when you get down to the finest detail, quite a bit of the plot doesn’t work, so you have to straighten things out. But every problem is an opportunity in disguise and I think we’ve cracked it.”

Davies’ next task is adapting of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty for a three-part BBC2 serial. “Alan doesn’t like me saying this but it’s a little bit like Brideshead Revisited,” says Davies. It is about a young gay man who in 1983 moves in with this glamorous family, the father of which is an up-and-coming Tory MP in Thatcher’s government.

“He goes through the whole thing of great hopes, money-making, drugs, parties, and in the end gets blamed for everything that goes wrong,” he says. “The other thing is, it’s also a picture of the eighties from the point of view of a young gay man coming out, the euphoria of falling in love, and also the tragedy of Aids.”

Davies might even have to write scenes featuring Margaret Thatcher. “I’ve not yet decided how we’re going to do that,” he muses. “In the novel, Thatcher comes to a party at the house, which is a big triumph, and our hero dances with her. But that might just be a bit overwhelming for viewers.”