Television
Mansfield stones
Clive Gammon
Why do the short stories of the first half of the century make such fine television? The question really needs trimming. The period of from Dubliners, say, to when the market for short stories died away just prior to the beginning of the second world war. And we only see the best of course, never the run of the mill journeyman stuff of Blackwoods Magazine and its contemporaries. Nevertheless, the impact is often such that they make custom-written short television plays seem vapid. Such was the case recently with ITV's Country Matters. So it was, a while back, with the dramatised D. H. Lawrence stories and, some years ago now, with a superb and moving interpretation of Joyce's "The Dead." Now BBC2 is giving
us a Katherine Mansfield season and the principle holds good: there is life in stories like " Sun, and Moon" that rarely exists in "Plays of the Month," "Plays for Our Time" or whatever other pre tentiously-entitled lightweight stuff comes regularly shimmering out of the box.
A Picture of Katherine Mansfield has two elements, for there's the framework of a dramatised biography enclosing treatments of two or three stories — a legitimate device since her stories are mined more clearly than most are from the author's life.
Vanessa Redgrave plays Katherine and what she said the other week in a Radio Times interview is worth quoting: "I suppose her immediate appeal was her detailed descriptions of people. Not only how they looked or what they wear but the sociological and idiosyncratic detail." Later on, Miss Redgravesaid, "1 remember wishing that modern playwrights would have a similar knack. So often one was faced with a person in a play who was "young and vivacious" which is no help in
creating a character All the actress is really saying is that Katherine Mansfield creates complex characters in whom she, the actress, can believe and hence play with authority. As Katherine herself, Miss Redgrave is quite excellent in conveying her in
gfehStator May 19 1973
telligence and her vulnerable gaiety.
Jeremy Brett as John Middleton Murry is fine also. I suppose like almost everyone else, because of
his highly-disguised portrait in Eyeless in Gaza, I think of John
M. M. as an archetypal ass and Brett's interpretation is right in line with this which may, I sup pose, be historically unjust but convinces me. Could a woman of Katherine Mansfield'ssensibilities and perception have committed herself to a man like this? I expect she could.
Meanwhile, with the possibility of a National Assembly for Scotland in the political air it was a happy coincidence for BBC 1 that its new five-part thriller Scotch on the Rocks started last week. this is a dramatisation of the novel, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond, about a bid by a mixed bunch including the leader of a Glasgow razor gang and the beautiful niece of the Secretary of State, to win independence for Scotland. The fantasy was compelling reading but whether the first television episode which had necessarily to introduce many diverse characters and themes in its first thirty minutes wasn't a little inchoate to someone who hadn't read the novel is a different matter. But all will be well when the shooting starts.
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