The latest BBC Woman in White and the Fosco challenge

So, I finally made my way through the BBC's latest The Woman in White adaptation. I wasn't blown away by it, but it did have some virtues. Above all, it stays faithful to the original story, or nearly (I'll come back to that), which sets it apart from the adaptation from the Nineties, not to mention the musical. Sir Percival Glyde's "Secret" is finally the same as in the book - hooray! - and Sir Percival dies dramatically in a church trying to destroy the evidence of it. The events leading up to this climax play out the same way as in the novel, too. The two heroines - the resourceful Marian Halcombe and her put-upon half-sister Laura Fairlie who is married off to the dastardly Glyde - are well-cast. Jessie Buckley has strong, somewhat masculine features which we might consider handsome today but would not have gone down well in the 19th century (hence Walter's reaction in the book: "this woman is ugly"), Olivia Vinall as Laura is pretty as a picture, and the acting of both is top-notch. Vinall plays Anne Catherick too, which makes every sort of sense, though she has to sport a somewhat off-putting set of dentures as Anne just to show that while similar, the two women are not identical. Marian is not, mercifully, made out to have a thing for Laura's true love Walter Hartright (for a moment, the narrative seems to be heading that way, but it backs away just in time). Instead, she is shown to be the true and loving sister she is in the book, and a good friend to Walter, too. As for Walter, he never resents Marian's early insistence that his and Laura's love isn't meant to be - as Laura is engaged, and Walter is her tutor, he can see for himself that things look hopeless. Another thing I thought worked well was the framing device of having a scrivener, Erasmus Nash, question various witnesses in the case which then leads to flashbacks of what happened. It gives a taste of the novel's clever structure of several narrators. I don't remember there being a Nash in the novel, and I suspect he may have been created as an excuse to shove Art Malik into the story, but I like Art Malik, so I can see why this is something one would want to do.   

As to elements that were more mixed: Charles Dance has and is fun as Frederick Fairlie, but beneath all that old-man make-up he is too much the picture of health to convince as an invalid. It is true that Mr Fairlie is a hypochondriac, with nothing much actually wrong with him, but he should at least be able to put up a show of being frail and infirm - Ian Richardson, with his wavering tones, was more convincing than Dance, whose voice still rings out with Tywin-like toughness. Dougray Scott is the right type for Sir Percival Glyde, and overall I'd say he earns a pass not without distinction: it's a tricky part, as the charismatic villain of the piece is so obviously meant to be Fosco, and Sir Percival is more of a second-league scoundrel. All the same, a little more plausible amiability in the early  stages of the story wouldn't have gone amiss. One reason why Sir Percival's marriage to Laura isn't halted is that no-one is able to find fault with him or pin something on him: it's only after the marriage that his true nature reveals itself. While Limmeridge House and Blackwater Park are both convincingly "house-cast" - the one looks imposingly affluent, the other gothic - other locations, like what passes for 19th-century London, isn't quite as persuasive: you get the impression that the budget wasn't exactly abundant.

When I looked up reviews of this adaptation, more than one of them spoke of it being a version of the tale "for the #metoo generation". Though they meant it as praise, I'm sure this labelling of the series didn't do it any favours. No need to fear a preach-fest, though. It's true the first scene features Marian railing against men who are allowed to "crush" women and go unpunished, but this and other outbursts of the same vein only occur when she is deeply upset on Laura's behalf. I didn't find them against character, and wouldn't be surprised if some of them were actually in the book (I haven't checked). Maybe the focus gets a little skewed as we never see Marian being scathing about her own sex, which I believe she was in the novel, but all the same I'd say the levels of modern right-on-ness are well below alarming. In fact, the most jarring scene for me wasn't Marian being a proto-feminist but Mr Fairlie's footman, Louis, rising up against him and demanding that he should apologise to his niece Laura at the end. Fond of Louis as Mr Fairlie seems to be - he is mentioned surprisingly often in Fairlie's narrative in the book - a servant would never be allowed to behave like that without being dismissed without a character. After all, there are other handsome footmen out here.

There are more serious problems with this adaptation than excessive pandering to modern sensibilities. For one thing, it feels way too long at four hours and a bit: the tense atmosphere of the novel doesn't quite translate, and I found myself yawning, especially in the beginning. Walter is little more than a pretty boy, whereas he should be a man of parts although he's the standard hero type. Above all, there's the presentation of the novel's main villain Count Fosco.

Yes, now it's finally time to address what I hinted at in the title. Riccardo Scamarcio is charismatic, but not in the Fosco way: he is far too Byronically dashing, and only a size-zero supermodel would call him fat. I could see Scamarcio working well as a world-weary seducer who's been at his game a while but is still very good at it. The novel's Fosco, though, is quite another sort of bad guy. He doesn't charm the domestic staff or Marian with smarmy hand-kisses but with bonhomie: he is the steely, amoral mastermind disguised as a jovial, humorous, sociable fat foreign gentleman. Although Fosco is a little too easy to like and "high-prestige" for me to be completely smitten with him as a villain, I appreciate him, and I've always assumed that the part in all its showiness would be an absolute gift for an actor. It seems, though, as if it's harder to bring Fosco into other media than the novel than one would have thought. The musical played him too much for laughs. In the Nineties adaptation, he was strangely muted - even though he was played by Simon Callow. Here, he is suddenly a Latin charmer, probably in order to make Marian's attraction to him more plausible to the viewers. This really isn't necessary. Fosco is no more conventionally handsome than Marian is conventionally pretty, but this doesn't stop them from coming across as attractive, exciting people in the novel. The challenge to rise to would surely have been to make this work in the TV format, too.