My Bookshelf

Monday 25 February 2013

BBC to make War and Peace


Worryingly, the title of this post took some time. I really thought that somehow I must be able to make some form of witty headline with this so that, at least occasionally, I can be seen to be as intelligent and hilarious as I truly am. I'm afraid, though, today is not that day as this is the best I could do. Let's move on.

Anyway so we've recently ascertained that Nicholas Hoult is to star in the Hollywood version of Sebastian Faulkes' Birdsong (see post
here), a part only recently taken on by fellow Brit, Eddie Redmayne, for the BBC. Now it's hard to feel sorry for Eddie because he's had a pretty fantastic couple of years with successes like My Week with Marilyn, playing King Richard II in Richard III at the Donmar Warehouse in London's West End and, more recently, singing his heart out in the BAFTA and Golden-Globe-winning Les Miserables. But. Saying all this. It seemed a little cruel that only a year after his performance in Birdsong is aired, Hollywood decide they can do better.

But it's ok, people - it's O.K. I know you were almost worried there. Eddie Redmayne is rumoured to be part of what surely promises to be a BBC masterpiece, an adaptation of Tolstoy's epic
War and Peace. Perhaps a little ambitiously, Andrew Davies (the mind behind previous BBC book-to-film triumphs Bleak House and Middlemarch) is retelling the story in just six 1-hour episodes. Bear in mind that last time the BBC tackled this beast of a book with Anthony Hopkins in the lead role, they made 20 episodes...

The novel, first published in 1869, centres on five aristocratic families in Russia and looks at the impact of the Napoleonic era and the French invasion.

No comments:

Post a Comment