So, Andrew Davies has bitten off the big one. It may have come as a surprise to some that the master of adapting the British classics for television hadn’t read Tolstoy’s classic-to-end-all-classics until the BBC mooted the idea of a new screen version, but this first episode (of six) boded very well all the same.
It was Davies adeptly laying out the domestic ground (battlefields, too), and introducing the characters. For anyone intimidated by the length of the original novel – not to mention the heavy accretions of philosophy and history that Tolstoy loaded onto it – the surprise may have been quite how uncomplicated the dynastic dynamics of the main players looked. Compared with the profusion of plots and associated strands that have crowded Davies’s ongoing Mr Selfridge, War and Peace so far seems almost straightforward.
Pierre is the most capacious character of the story - and the closest to Tolstoy himself
The three young protagonists who grace the idyllically preened promo material (main picture) are indeed the centre of Tolstoy’s story, though the complexities of two of them – Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky – are yet to become apparent. Lily James as Natasha may have looked older than her teenage years here, but she’s still to blossom beyond the close family environment that surrounded her, while James Norton as dashing Prince Andrei remained emotionally rather one-dimensional in his unattractive disdain for his pregnant wife and almost simplistic desire to get on with military heroics.
Which latched our attention firmly to Pierre Bezukhov (Paul Dano), recently returned from abroad to make an apprehensive entry into St Petersburg society (pictured below), and reunited in the process with his old friend Andrei. Pierre is the most capacious character of the story – and the closest to Tolstoy himself – and Dano plays him with a gaucheness that defined itself slowly. His illegitimacy in itself didn’t set him apart from this aristocratic world – one of the nice touches of the episode was the volte face which that milieu performed the moment his inheritance was confirmed – but it was as if he almost made an effort not to belong, extolling the heroism of Napoleon in the abstract even as his hero waged war with Russia and her allies. He hardly seemed to have bothered even to dress for the occasion.Dano captured that outsider quality well, coming to feel at home only in the natural intimacy of the Rostov household in Moscow. Pierre was much more acted upon here, than acting. The last to respond in the rather hammy, hold-onto-the-will deathbed scene which saw his position maintained only with feisty support from other quarters, he then allowed himself – and his fortune – to be wrapped around the delectable but icy little finger of Helene Kuragina (Tuppence Middleton).
If that left you thinking that Dano’s Pierre was not only a bit too nice, but even a bit wet, well he was. Davies’s delight in character was firmly with the devious elements of his story, most of all the scheming of Stephen Rea’s Prince Kuragin (pictured below), who was plotting from the very start with the hostess of the first scene (Gillian Anderson, costumed with a rather more modern glamour than her guests?). We may know Davies as screenwriter best from his celebrated Jane Austen, but the atmosphere here was more properly Victorian, hinting even at Wilkie Collins (like Dickens, a favourite of Tolstoy).
The finesse with which père et fille Kuragin manipulated the hapless Pierre was a triumphant reversal of gender expectations, a portrait of marriage as a trap every bit rivalling Henry James’s later Portrait of a Lady. Tuppence Middleton’s face as Helene had cunning written all over it, just as her dashing brother Anatole (Callum Turner) had cad inscribed on his, to a degree that couldn't help but frustrate even his father’s manipulative intentions with regard to the Bolkonsky household. If Tolstoy’s decent characters indeed look a bit low on conviction so far, there’s no doubting the passionate intensity of his villains.
Brother and sister Kuragin, of course, have attracted the advance publicity for this War and Peace, with Davies amplifying (in one scene so far) a suggestion of incest from Tolstoy’s novel into something rather (but really not very much) more explicit: the whole hullabaloo looks far more engineered to make a headline or two. The point, simple enough, is that these siblings operate with a shared slipperiness that’s all the more lethal for their physical beauty, while there’s no doubt, as we witness Rea’s manipulations, as to where their gene pool came from.
The risk of making things more explicit than they need to be – for the sake, presumably, of contemporary appeal? – is there, though. There’s a scene in the second episode that has the almost protean Dolokhov (Tom Burke) rogering Helene in flagrante over the dining-table that would have been more at home in Blackadder. It seemed out of place here against the grander sense of the whole canvas of human life that Tolstoy will duly reveal to us. Davies and his director Tom Harper really have assembled a glorious cast, never more so than in the fathers of the households, Jim Broadbent (pictured left) as the remote old Prince Bolkonsky – a character out of the 18th century if ever there was one – and his counterpart chez Rostov, that great enjoyer of life Count Ilya (Adrian Edmondson).
We may have seen less of him, but Brian Cox as the acerbic General Kutuzov, the Russian commander who prefers to retreat tactically rather than engage in battle, was up there with the best of them, too. The grandest battle scenes – Borodino, most of all – come later, but the end of this opener had an impressively nifty cavalry charge from which the comely Nikolai Rostov (Jack Lowden) ended up retreating in ignominious injury.
The best is yet to come with the social set-pieces too, prime among them the celebrated ball scene. That’s something to be looked forward to, not least for the fact that this production (BBC Wales, in collaboration with the Weinstein Company, a combination you don't come across every day) was filmed partly on original Russian locations, with St Petersburg standing in for itself in some exteriors, while the Catherine Palace outside that city will provide the glittering mirrors for the dance spectacular. (The rest of the action, interiors and exteriors alike, was shot in Lithuania, and it looks, costumes included, very nice indeed.) So far this War and Peace is looking like a rather winning proposition.