TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/82/82brides

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Brideshead Revisited
Memories of a Golden Past

January 18, 1982

A lavish British series mirrors Evelyn Waugh, faults and all

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED PBS, beginning Jan. 18, 8 p.m., E.S.T.  It is an
odd book by one of the century's oddest writers, and even he had
serious reservations about it.  "I reread Brideshead and was
appalled," he wrote Graham Greene in 1950, five years after
publication.  But Brideshead Revisited, overwritten and underplotted,
is and probably will remain Evelyn Waugh's best-known and most
popular novel, a lush, sentimental tribute to Catholicism and to the
period between the wars that Waugh regarded as the last gorgeous days
of the British aristocracy.  Now, in this lavish and beautiful
eleven-part series from Britain's Granada Television, U.S. viewers
will be able to see why a book so often derided is yet so often
loved.

Probably never before, in fact, has a novel been so faithfully
adapted.  John Mortimer's script preserves big chunks of Waugh's
narrative prose in addition to his dialogue.  "We went for the book
whole," says Producer Derek Granger.  "We were true to its faults as
well as its virtues, but the faults--the overluxuriance, for
instance--are also rather appealing.  Waugh wrote it during a very
bleak period of World War II, and he looked back to his days in
Oxford as golden, halcyon."  The most expensive TV production ever to
come from Britain (about $9.9 million), Brideshead Revisited has a
cast that includes John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Mona
Washbourne, Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick.  Not to
mention, of course, that wonderful baroque pile called Castle Howard,
which may indeed be the very house the author saw in his mind when he
described the fictional Brideshead, first glimpsed on a cloudless day
in June, "prone in the sunlight, gray and gold amid a screen of
boskage."

The young man who does the glimpsing is Brideshead's narrator,
Charles Ryder (Irons), who finds his army unit bivouacked by
coincidence on the grounds he knows so well.  He had been introduced
to the house years earlier by one of its inhabitants.  Sebastian
Flyte (Andrews), an Oxford classmate renowned for "his beauty, which
was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to
know no bounds."  In the flashbacks arising from Ryder's bittersweet
memories, Sebastian gives long, champagne-inspired lunches in his
rooms and, in an extravagant undergraduate fantasy, carries with him
everywhere a large Teddy bear named Aloysius.  Charles and Sebastian
form a strong attachment and probably--although the relationship is
kept behind its own screen of boskage in both the book and the
series--become lovers.

Ryder soon falls in love with the entire Flyte family and becomes for
a time almost an adopted son.  His own widowed father (Gielgud) is
comically austere in his affections; when his son returns to their
London home after 15 months, he looks up in unhappy surprise and
says, "Oh, dear."  The Flytes, by contrast, are warm and charming.
Their only fault, in Charles' conventional Anglican eyes, is their
obsession with their exotic, un-English Catholic religion.

Propelled by piety, Lady Marchmain (Bloom) tries to mold everyone
into goodness.  Therein lies much of the family tragedy.  Lord
Marchmain (Olivier), his love turned to hatred, has gone into self-
imposed exile in Venice; Sebastian becomes a doomed and hopeless
alcoholic.  "Poor Mummy," he says, when he later learns of her death.
"She was a true femme fatale.  She killed with a touch."  Sebastian's
beautiful sister Julia (Quick) meantime married a crass politician,
and Charles, who has become a painter, enters into an unhappy
marriage of his own.  Ten years later, the two of them meet again on
an ocean liner, and Charles loves the sister as he did the brother--
on-camera this time.  Summing up 12 1/2 hours, Bloom jokingly
remarks, "Boy meets boy.  Boy loses boy.  Boy finds girl.  Girl dumps
boy.  Boys goes off alone."

At the beginning, Charles' enchantment with Sebastian and the
Marchmains' way of life is infectious, and the first several hours of
Brideshead are a glorious feast--even better, no doubt, than those
served up in Sebastian's rooms at Christ Church college.  The acting
is scrupulous.  Gielgud's scenes with Irons in the Ryder dining room
in London are small comic masterpieces of timing and nuance.
Olivier's grand scenes come at the end, when Lord Marchmain comes
home to die at Brideshead.

The trouble, for which Waugh is really responsible, comes after
Sebastian takes up a drunkard's residence in the remoteness of North
Africa.  When he leaves--for the last several hours, he is never
seen--he takes with him the story's focal point and vitality.  Like
many narrators, Charles is a reactor, someone who responds to people
more interesting than himself.  When he is forced to stand in the
spotlight, he does not know what to do, and therefore does nothing.

"I think Charles might have had a little more glamour," Waugh's
friend Nancy Mitford delicately complained to him when he sent her an
advance copy of the book.  Mitford saw the point of making
the narrator "dim," but asked, "Would Julie and her brother and her
sister all be in love with him if he was?"  Irons asked himself the
same question when he was assigned the role.  "Is this character
going to bore the audience terribly?" he wondered.  "He certainly
bores the pants off me."

One solution considered during the shooting was to depart from Waugh
and bring Sebastian back into the story.  Charles Sturridge, who
succeeded Michael Lindsay-Hogg as director and is responsible for
most of what appears onscreen, did bring Sebastian back in a test
scene that showed him in North Africa in the '30s, but the scene was
discarded in editing.  Still, the production's fidelity to Waugh is
something viewers can respect.  Several hours of brilliance are worth
a couple of tedium.  Once hooked, it is doubtful that many people
will give up on the series.  That, in any event, was the experience
in Britain, where the last episode ran Dec. 22.  Though it never won
top ratings, the program did score a solid hit with the well-off and
educated viewers prized by advertisers, and there was something of a
Brideshead cult.  Restaurants and theater owners complained of lack
of business on Brideshead Tuesdays, and Anglophiles as far away as
Peking begged for TV cassettes.  Costume parties were built around
the show, and pretty Sebastian look-alikes were spotted accompanying
Teddy bears into smart discos.

How would Waugh, who died in 1966, have liked it?  Very much, if the
opinion of his son Auberon, who is also a writer, is any indication.
"It's the best bit of television I've ever seen," he says.  "It is
tremendously enjoyable, incredibly true to the novel."  Evelyn Waugh
never had much affection for Americans or for television, however,
and he probably would have had no more than a harrumph of derision
for the newest U.S. edition of the book, which bills itself as a
"companion to the PBS television series."

--By Gerald Clarke.
  Reported by Jef McAllister/London