Adapt or die, goes the old saying. But in the case of Birdsong maybe it’s adapt and die. I’ve now sat through versions made for the stage (Comedy Theatre) and made for TV (BBC One). In my head this was a Day of Judgement, a Sky Sports Super Sunday. Which one of the two great loves of my life (theatre and telly) would fare the best, or die the least? Showtime!
The adaptation in question is that of Sebastian Faulks’s 1993 novel Birdsong. Trevor Nunn had a crack at it a full year ago; I had to wait untill this weekend to get Abi Morgan’s BBC comeback. Okay, so it was a really long day.
The book tracks Edwardian Stephen Wraysford’s doomed love affair with Isabelle, an unhappily married Frenchwoman in Amiens, before it pitches our damaged, dislocated hero into the horror of the Somme. It’s the time-honoured pairing of Eros and Thanatos: sex and death. The carnal turns to carnage, and roiling sex scenes give way to the equally intimate spilling of blood and organs on the battlefield.The novel striates highly personal testament with the sheer statistical might of the First World War. It’s a tough brief for both stage and small screen.
Trevor Nunn plied the route of a clunking and rushed literalism. If the book mentions a rose trellis, it’s duly cranked into place. If the gendarmerie swarm across the pages, alors the Keystone Kops sont arrivés on stage. The epic sweep is swept, tidily, into Stephen’s mouth. Poor Ben Barnes as Stephen must curate history for us, as well as get on with being broken and detached.
TV director Philip Martin nabs a few of theatre’s tricks for his scenography. It progresses by synecdoche: the battlefields are lightly suggested. We’re shown a detail and we extrapolate the rest, like a wallpaper repeat (my only gripe would be that Ypres looked like the sun-baked Med). Amiens is not much more than a trick of the light (Mr Nunn please take note). Where both adaptations fail, however, is in Faulks’s monstrous tunnels under the trenches. No visuals can possibly match a reader’s imagination; they shrink and fix into what Joyce snappily called “the ineluctable modality of the visible” (pay attention at the back, Trevor).
Then, ooh la la, there’s all that sex. As the lovely Kurt Vonnegut says: “The most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.”
In Faulks’s version of the most popular story, Isabelle is a soft pat of inert womanhood who needs a Lawrentian reboot. She’s a Sleeping Beauty to be, literally, pricked into life. Theatre took the embarrassed vicar approach and ignored the entire messy business. After this Trevor Nunnery, it was good to see the BBC at least have a go at scenes of consensual sex. There was something about the lovely imperfection of Clémence Poésy that somehow made Isabelle less of a cypher: that shocking ink-spattering of dark freckles; that guarded look in her eyes which kept her – despite all the bonking – actually impenetrable.
TV’s final, imperious slap to stage is the close-up. The camera can gorge on tiny details, like the erotic brush of two ankles. Against this the theatre seems operatic, mannered. Televisual Birdsong was really all about the close-up on the lead actor’s face. In Eddie Redmayne we have a translucent, lambent Stephen. A jolie-laide, as the French say of their women, with a great grouper fish mouth, he is more reactor than actor. His face clouds and clears like the weather. He is enormously watchable.
Bravo to Abi Morgan for her confident chequerboard restructuring (love; war; love). But despite having more time and more resources than the theatre, this show also suffered from abbreviation sickness. When you take the events of Stephen’s life at a rolling gallop, you are left with a blur of melodrama. Characters flatten to clichés (the plucky Tommy, lions led by donkeys) and lines turn over-weighty, “There is nothing more, sir, than to love and be loved!” Viewers are also treated as birdbrains by the music, which helpfully semaphores sad bit, sexy bit, with all the subtlety of Children in Need.
On this particular Super Sunday it’s a one-nil victory to telly, but the match was a bit scrappy, to be honest, the lads done all right but at the end of the day could have gone either way.
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