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Women in Love

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

Even at the peak of my blue-stocking phase, when I used to bash through fat novels as if they were meringues, I loathed D H Lawrence. The tedious obsession with sex. The terrible, euphemistic prose. The chippiness. The plodding symbolism. The way his characters, in the absence of anything approaching a plot, talk endlessly of completion and (yuck) emptying themselves. The creepy way he projects his own desires on to his women. The latent incest hanging over family life, like some poisonous miasma. Even Sons and Lovers, probably the least offensive of his major novels, makes me feel queasy. I have only to think of the moment when its hero, Paul Morel, gazes tenderly on his mother's age-spotted hands to want to rid myself of my breakfast.

I'm not alone. Save for the hullabaloo surrounding the Chatterley trial, Lawrence has been mostly unfashionable since his first novel was published in 1910. Yet he has his fans, and these poor souls tend to be almost demented in their devotion. Take William Ivory, writer of BBC4's Women in Love (24 and 31 March, 9pm). According to a piece he has written for the Radio Times, Lawrence is the "greatest English novelist of the 20th century" because "he shouts so loudly". Why does he shout? "Because the kingdom he is hoping to direct us towards is not merely a desirable place, it is the only place." And what happens in this, er, "kingdom"? Apparently, it's a land where "humanity [is] at the heart of the sex act". Poor Mr Ivory. He's got it bad, hasn't he?

Having failed to digest this teenage bilge, I was dreading watching the thing — but his drama is as enjoyable as something by Lawrence could be. I liked it a good deal more than Ken Russell's 1969 film, in which Ollie Reed and Alan Bates flashed their bits and passed it off as high art. There were two reasons for this. First, the adaptation is relatively brief. Ivory has turned a little of The Rainbow and a lot of Women in Love, both of which are long and rambling, into two 90-minute films. Result: the mysticism and navel-gazing are kept to a minimum.

Second, it has a marvellous cast: a bunch of actors who could make almost anything sound alive. The Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, whose "journey" to fulfilment lies at the heart of Women in Love, are played by Rachael Stirling and Rosamund Pike. The only criticism I have is that Pike has no trace of an East Midlands accent, which separates her from the rest of the family far more than her unnerving, milky beauty. Otherwise, both of them are excellent: feline, wondering, excitable, trapped and liberated by turn.

Meanwhile, their future lovers — the colliery owner Gerald Crich and his school inspector pal, Rupert Birkin — are depicted as two tightly coiled springs by Joseph Mawle and Rory Kinnear. Then there are Saskia Reeves and Ben Daniels as the Brangwen parents, Anna and Will. Reeves plays the housewife martyr superbly. Your fingertips tingle with irritation every time she comes into view, bearing a tea tray. But Daniels's performance is the more affecting. The scene in which he offers Gudrun his bag of lemon sherbets as he waits with her for her train to London — the city of lustful adventures — is shot through with unspoken love and worry.

Ivory has, needless to say, taken a few liberties with the text. I remember that Rupert was secretly hot for Gerald, but I cannot for the life of me recall the scene in which he tried to cop off with a soldier in a lavatory, only to be punched in the face for his trouble. But then, television requires something more than circular conversation, doesn't it? I don't suppose we can blame him for adding incident. And there are still lines such as this one: "You do not accompany me… into the unknown… into wonder." (Translation: "You just don't do it for me in bed.") Generally, though, this is beautiful to watch, unexpectedly fascinating and, thus far, blessedly free of nude wrestling.

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Women in Love

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

An outstanding cast wallows once again in Lawrence's psychosexual quagmire as William Ivory's superb adaptation (it may even shade Ken Russell's cinematic landmark) concludes. World War One has been and gone, embedding in Gerald (Joseph Mawle) a deeper streak of self-destructive violence and in Rupert (Rory Kinnear) a greater determination to escape the horrors of the physical world for the comforts of the aesthetic; one talks about love but can't make it, the other… Well, you can guess. Gudrun (Rosamund Pike), meanwhile, has returned to the Midlands, chastened but not defeated; Ursula (Rachael Stirling), spurned by Rupert for poisonous Hermione, has sought solace in teaching. Ivory's script takes liberties — notably in transferring the climactic pas de quatre from the Alps to the north African desert — but adheres tightly enough to the overriding flavour and themes of the novel to get away with it. And the performances are just fearless, emotionally and physically.

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Women in Love

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

Cringe-making in the extreme, 20 minutes of BBC4's new two-part drama Women in Love brought back floods of memories reminding me why I find D H Lawrence such a pretentious bore.

Back in 1960, I avidly read the press coverage of the obscenity court case over Lady Chatterley's Lover. A year after Penguin Books won the right to publish the novel, it had sold over two million copies — more than the Bible. It marked a turning point for freedom of expression, and yet as a sexually curious teenager, I found the book a complete let-down. I just couldn't see what the fuss had been about.

This adaptation of two other D H Lawrence novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, is a grim watch. The dialogue seems stilted and risible. The women are so annoying you want to slap them. Even the nudity is weirdly unattractive.

After South Riding and Downton Abbey, it's hard to watch period drama where the characters speak in such an unnatural way. Rachael Stirling as Ursula and Rosamund Pike as Gudrun do their best, but this revival is an unerotic affair.

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Women in Love

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

BBC4 was doing its best last week to show sex without having sex. Posh sex, I guess. Nothing was on show but we saw plenty of it. Women in Love (BBC4, Thursday) is also based on DH Lawrence's The Rainbow.

Despite rampant romping, this first episode of the two-parter, was something of a dirge. Perhaps that was down to Mr Lawrence. The script didn't help either, with such gems as: "Sex really is the most natural thing in the world." Well, apart from eating, drinking and breathing.

The casting of the family was weird, too. The parents didn't look old enough to have two grown-up girls.

The tone of the drama also felt like Chekhov and that's not a good thing. Despite seeming happy on the outside, everybody was a little depressed. Even actor Ben Daniel's patriarch character was out of sorts despite being told by his wife that he could shop around for another bedfellow.

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Women in Love

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

DH Lawrence was the great proselytiser of transcendent passion, the elemental desire that can set even the most sheltered life ablaze. Like many men of my vintage, I was introduced as a boy to Lawrence and transcendent passion by the TV screening of Ken Russell's film version of Women in Love, in particular the scenes of Glenda Jackson liberated from the soulless constraints of clothing.

But as the characters in Women in Love and its predecessor, The Rainbow, only belatedly realise, life has a habit of dampening even the most ardent emotions. Back in the early 70s I certainly never dreamt that decades hence a primly decorous Jackson would become my local MP.

All of which is to say that any film-maker looking to adapt Lawrence first has to negotiate Russell. Step back from the ruddy-faced auteur's exuberant eroticism — exemplified by the famous naked wrestling scene — and something of Lawrence's earthy experimentalism is lost; go too far and the risk is a rumpy-pumpy parody.

William Ivory has joined The Rainbow and Women in Love together, as Lawrence originally intended, and with the help of two splendid performances from Rosamund Pike, as the artistic libertine Gudrun, and Rachael Stirling, as her lustful sister Ursula, has largely succeeded in creating something true to itself.

That its truth was narrow and overstated had as much to do with budgetary limitations as Lawrence's libidinous preoccupations. Just as the previous week's Christopher and His Kind tried to cram the whole of Berlin's Weimar decadence into one basement bar, so Women in Love relied rather too heavily on the interior of an arts club to represent London's bohemia.

The same squeeze was placed on the pacing in the first of a two-parter that could have done with a third to allow the characters to take a breath between stewing and screwing. Every sexual proclamation, of which there were a manifesto-full, was directly followed by a carnal demonstration, so that a staccato rhythm of theory and practice, more like that of an illustrated lecture, broke up the flow of the drama.

Complaining of too much sex in a dramatisation of Lawrence is like accusing an adaptation of Hardy of too much misfortune. And only the most dismal of minds could wish to see the refulgent Rosamund cover up. This was no betrayal of the source material, but there was so much rutting going on that it was difficult to distinguish one set of inflamed loins from another — which, on reflection, may have been the point.

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