Quarter 1 Review- 002 Historial Drama- Old

002 Historical Drama – Old

Not too divorced from The Scarlet Pimpernel in time period and exuberance (and probably the writers’ social and political beliefs) was the delightfully over-the-top Friday’s Child by Georgette Heyer, from 1995.  A massive production—you have to admire the actors for really going for it.  Sherry (Lord Sheringham, played by James Frain) is a bit of a fop and wastrel, who doesn’t come into his father’s fortune unless he marries.  So, his proposal rejected by childhood friend Isabella Milborne (Annabel Mulllion), he marries another childhood friend, the youthful orphan Hero Wantage (Elli Garnett), instead.  Hero loves Sherry, and for him it’s a marriage of convenience, but she is naïve, young, and artless (he calls her Kitten and Brat).  Her personality wins over Sherry’s friends including George, Gil, and Ferdy (Julian Rhind-Tutt).  The long-suffering George wants to marry Isabella, and meanwhile the dastardly rake Montagu Revesby goes around impregnating random women and leaving them and their babies to starve.  After a disagreement, Hero runs away from Sherry, hiding in Bath.  An unrecognizable Simon Russell Beale plays Jasper Tarleton, an older man who wants to run away with Hero, whom he takes for a single girl.  Revesby gets his come-uppance, Sherry and Hero reconcile, and George at last gets to marry Isabella.  Nothing much happens—and it’s far more about the lives of the 2% than Jane Austen—but the characters are a lot of fun. And oh yes, there is a pug, whom everyone calls odious.  Adapted by John Peacock, Friday’s Child also starred Nicholas Boulton, Mary Wimbush, Ian Hughes, Peter Kenny, Paul Panting, Cathy Sera, Susan Sheridan, Eva Stuart, Tessa Worsley, Jilly Bond, David Antrobus, and David Bannerman (!!).  

Yet again set in roughly the same time period, Young Coleridge is very different, indeed.  One of Martyn Wade’s earliest and most serious works, it stars Tom Wilkinson as the tortured, eponymous poet.  Young Coleridge is an attempt to get inside Coleridge’s head for a day, from when he wakes up the whole household in his house in Keswick with his opium-induced nightmares to when he needs opium that evening to help him sleep.  Coleridge is a complex, not entirely self-aware man, and his relationship with his wife Sara is fraught.  Care is taken in this story to help the listener understand that Coleridge puts impossible demands upon his wife and holds her to different standards than he does himself; at the same time, you do feel sorry for him, as he’d like to divorce her and marry his soulmate Asra (another Sara).  He also has complicated relationships with his friends, mainly due to ego and the fact that they are either more productive and more agreeable (Robert Southey) or more productive and more devilish but openly devilish (the nymphomaniac William Hazlitt).  Coleridge also has the tendency to say the wrong thing, despite having good intentions—such as continually bringing up the fact that Southey and his wife Edith have lost a child.  Added to this peculiar household, a holdover from Coleridge’s Panisocratic days, are extended relatives like Mrs Lovell.  I had never heard Tom Wilkinson on radio before, and unsurprisingly he did a very convincing job (though I did get distracted trying to match up the voice with the portrait I know of Coleridge, long hair and full lips).  Young Coleridge starred Jennie Stoller, Gary Bond, Christopher Good, Narissa Knights, Moira Leslie, Amanda Murray, Elizabeth Rider, Brian smith, Christopher Douglas, Elizabeth Lindsay, Ellen McIntosh, and was directed by Cherry Cookson in 1984.