In her voluptuous romp of a novel, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters took just over 100 pages to make the Sapphic graphic. Andrew Davies's adaptation achieved the same feat in under 45 minutes. But, then, his was a costume drama whose only purpose was to remove its costume.
At any rate, there was little attempt to get under the characters' skin before exposing it. The result was a lesbian love scene as perfunctory as any other television love scene. The same standardised choreography, the same carefully positioned bedsheets. The one novelty, and it was nothing to moan about, was that there were four breasts on show instead of the usual two.
Rachael Stirling, as a fish monger, emoted a paralysed longing, and Keeley Hawes, a music-hall male impersonator, was a crisp beauty. Yet the couple never remotely looked as if they wanted to get into bed together. Nor, come to that, did they look like a fishmonger or a music-hall male impersonator. Her delicate sexiness and sardonic delivery give Hawes the appeal of a younger Kristin Scott Thomas, and Stirling looked a bit like her mother, Diana Rigg. Alas, she sounded a lot like Jean Marsh in Upstairs Downstairs. The accent alone was a carnal death knell.
But passion has no need to speak for itself when there is voiceover to spell it out. The viewer, not trusted to gather that Stirling's despairing expression meant she craved something more from her friend, heard her disembodied complaint: "I didn't want to be her sister — I wanted to be her sweetheart."
Adaptations of first-person novels inevitably face the problem of what to do about the narrator's internal monologue. Could Davies, who has adapted more books than most of us have read, not have found a better solution than a restatement of the visually obvious? Perhaps the workload is finally taking its toll. He's too talented to be a hack, but jobs like these must hack away at his talent.
In his defence, Davies cannot be blamed for the overall cursoriness of the production. The truncated music- hall scenes and cropped views of London that only a pigeon would recognise spoke of a directorial imagination as limited as the budget. There was plenty of colour but no texture. Late Victorian England was seen merely as a decorative backdrop where in the book it formed the fabric of the story. The polite circumlocutions of the prose were a tantalising contrast to the forbidden desires of the protagonists. Waters understood the erotic potential that lies between what is said and how it's said. In the first instalment of this three-parter, style and content enjoyed none of that tension. These women were constrained only by their corsets. And not for long.
It's an odious business comparing a screen adaptation with the original novel. They are different forms, but they are also related fictions whose shared aim is to reveal the same, or similar, truths. As the fishmonger said at the beginning of the film: "Open an oyster and it's a secret world in there." In a novel, the world is your oyster, even in a novel whose world is oysters. But in an adaptation, the oyster is your world. And it takes more than extracting it from its shell to unveil its secrets. Perhaps that's a thought to keep in mind when I tell you that next week's episode features a strap-on dildo.
