chickenfeet

Earlier this year BBC Radio Four broadcast an adaptation of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time by one Michael Butt, who appears to have a long track record as a radio dramatist. Now, I don't envy anyone having to condense Dance into six 53 minute episodes but I have to say that Mr. Butt did a bloody awful job.

His take his rather odd. He explicitly presents Widmerpool as a man who spends his whole life taking revenge on the world because "he was despised at school for being of a lower social class". He also presents Nick Jenkins, especially in his later years, as a rude, bad tempered, ineffective person increasingly hen pecked by a shrewish Isobel. One wonders if Butt had some special reason to dislike Powell and so presents a pseudo-Powell that he can denigrate.

Butt has an obsession with sex and social class but actually doesn't seem to know much about either. His explicit and tiresome harping on sexual themes is actually much less erotic than Powell's very allusive treatment and, frankly, he doesn't get social class at all whereas Powell has an extremely nuanced grasp of an admittedly difficult subject. Oddly although Peggy Stepney's first words to Nick on being introduced to him are to ask about his and Charles Stringham's masturbatory habits (typical behaviour for the daughter of an earl in the 1920s?) when it comes to Gwinnett's necrophilia Mr. Butt goes all coy on us and pretty much ignores it.

Mr. Butt doesn't help himself by some of the more gratuitous changes he makes. His thesis about Widmerpool's class might have made some sense if he had retained Powell's original school which, though never named, is clearly Eton. By transferring the action to "Kenton's; a minor public" the idea becomes rather absurd. Widmerpool is socially entirely typical of that kind of school. He is, for instance, of a significantly higher social class than myself who attended such a school as a scholarship boy. After all, he gets invited to debutante balls. Also, presumably because M. Butt thinks his audience is a bit thick, the language used to describe the school would have better fitted a contemporary comprehensive than a public school then, or indeed, now. LeBas is descrtibed as "head of year" for instance.

The presentation of Nick is odd indeed. It gets particularly odd when Emily Brightman comes into the story transformed into a rather obnoxious psychologist hell bent on explaining why Nick writes autobiographical novels. (Here we get an explicit rerecitation of the Widmerpool class thesis in case Mr Butt hasn't been obvious enough!).

There are all kinds of minor but weird shifts; Oxford becomes Cambridge, the Templers live in Reading; Shrubworth is in Sussex; Nick's regiment s stationed in Llandudno (if nothing else this makes the air raid scene a bit unlikely unless the German high command really had it in for sea birds), Bob Duport becomes Bob Newport, Dai and Shoni become Dai and Morgan (oddly the joke is about having time to "stuff" the girls rather than "fuck" them which seems a strange point to go puritanical) Scorp Murtlock is running an anarchist terror cell and so on. There seem to be no good reaon for these changes except perhaps the last. Given that Trelawney and Myra Erdleigh don't make it into this version it perhaps makes more sense to have Widmerpool move to the "loonie left" rather than to a mystical cult. The rest just make no sense.

There are also a long list of careless errors that a half decent continuity person ought to have caught. The older Widmerpool is described in various places as either "Lord Widmerpool" or "Sir Kenneth Widmerpool". Either way is wife should not be styled "Lady Pamela Widmerpool". The Jeavons flat is hit by a "doodlebug" at least two years before such weapons existed. If the Germans had developed V weapons that could travel back in time the course of the war may well have been different. Nick and Bithel join their platoons in the rank of captain (rapid promotion indeed) and Robert Tolland is killed in the fighting around the Cinque Ports (no word on how the German invasion fared though).

Perhaps unavoidably given the degree of compression some characters appear out of nowhere and disappear equally fast. Odo Stevens' sole contribution is to go cigarette shopping for Pamela, for example.

All in all it's not a very attractive piece of work. It gives the impression of having been knocked off in a hurry by someone not overly familiar with either the books or the subject matter they describe.

A biography of famous French philosopher Georges Dupont from Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis c.1978 (25MB).

For the last three or four days I have had been accompanied while running/working out by a really excellent BBC version of Sophocles' Antigone. I don't know a lot about the production except that it's a Robert Fagles translation and Patrick Stewart is a really first rate Kreon. All in all, very well done and highly enjoyable.

I really love having an almost inexhaustible supply of excellent drama, book dramatizations and readings to use while I'm running. Next up is a dramatisation of Vanity Fair with Stephen Fry as the narrator. I expect it to be much better than it ought to be.