Television
The lady and the duchess
Clive Gawp
God protect us from the pretentious, especially those ladies on last week's One Pair of Eyes (BBC-2) who have such inflated ideas of their importance as pop biographers. Lady Antonia Fraser, with whom the programme was chiefly concerned, felt her responsibility deeply because one of her books could "change the attitude of a generation " to that particular subject. And Margaret Laing, who recently wrote an interim biography of Mr Heath, went even further. "You could wreck somebody's career," she said of her work. Well I can imagine my col
league Juliette having such fears, though she has been doing better lately, but really Miss Laing, do you honestly believe that? Perhaps these ladies were encouraged in their beliefs by Radio 'Times which burbled, "One single book can easily change the attitudes of a generation to a great public figure." (Now that sounds familiar, doesn't it? Ah, yes, it's almost what our authoress said a moment ago.)
For no particular reason I hadn't read Lady Antonia's biographies of Mary Queen of Scots and Cromwell. This programme, I'm afraid, did harm to any future ambition I might have in that direction. Much of it was taken up with a dreadfully cosy conversation between Lady Antonia and her mother, also a , writer of biographies of well known historical figures, in which both ladies spoke so slowly and carefully and in such simplistic diction that I thought they would soon start to tell us about Ju-dy and her Mag-ic Wish-ing Chair. Later we saw Lady Antonia capering about on a Scottish island • identifying with Mary Queen of Scots. Of biography she told us, " I do it because I love doing it." As the little boy said as he picked his nose.
All of which has now made me feel a bit like Bosola, the ' intelligencer ' in The Duchess of Malfi who in his evil, Italianate ; way puts in the hard word against Her Grace causing everything to end in a welter of poison, incest, madness and blood as every good Jacobean tragedy should.
Last week's. BBC-1 production was orthodox and not without style. It offered nothing new (why should it?) in the way of interpretation. As the Duchess, Eileen Atkins displayed a charming wantonness (in the seventeenth-century sense) but marginally missed the ' greatness ' which the text keeps insisting on, though the lines, in the death scene particularly, are sometimes too stoic to be human anyway. The cardinal, much more interesting than his daft, incestuous brother, was subtly played by T. P. McKenna. My acquaintance With Webster's play had hitherto been solely as a reader. It's a commonly voiced, though maybe mistaken, notion that some seventeenthcentury plays are better read than seen on the stage. Certainly the absurdities of plot (Bosola and the apricots, his finding of the horoscope, the awkward time pattern and lack of unity, the cardinal's poisoning of Julia) I found more obtrusive in the television production and also the horrors seemed to lose impact through being seen and heard instead of read. I'm without a handy text, but the lines in the last act when the cardinal describes how the duke, afflicted with lycanthropy, has been seen in a lane behind St Mark's churchyard with a dead man's leg (" and he howled fearfully ") stand out in print more horribly than they do spoken.
But I expect this is mere crabbed, closet criticism. The two hours flew. A fine production.
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