"BRIDESHEAD REVISITED"/REVISITED

The famous TV drama of the famous book is getting the big screen treatment.

The big screen version of Brideshead Revisited is out and about in Yorkshire, having opted to begin its 11 week shoot at Castle Howard. Note: given the rains in June, the cast have had to be almost as gifted at imitating ducks as they are at playing more conventional parts.

And what a cast it is: starting with Matthew Goode who plays the Oxford student who meets the flamboyant Ben Whishaw and is taken to his “castle” home where lurks Ben’s divine and seductive sister Hayley Atwell amidst some gloomy family practices and heirlooms.

Other names popping up at those stately pile include Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon as Whishaw’s appropriately stately parents (trouble there, no doubt), Ed Stoppard, Felicity Jones, Jonathan Cake and Greta Scacchi.

What attracts such a wealth of talent to a project beyond the prospect of numerous Yorkshire puddings? Well, the script undoubtedly, given that is penned by Andrew Davies (Bleak House) and Jeremy Brock (The last King of Scotland) and is a tale of forbidden love (read homosexuality, as the story starts in 1925) plus the loss of innocence as England’s aristocracy begins its death spiral. Mind you, for the lucky few, there is also the attraction of the scenes set in Venice and Morocco.

The man waving the wand over the whole is Julian Jarrold, director of Becoming Jane and Kinky Boots, which should give some clues to the clever as to how the finished film will look.

For Jarrold, one of the great challenges will be to focus on the book by Evelyn Waugh, the original subject material, rather than the TV adaptation, staring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews alongside Phoebe Nicholls, which was water cooler telly even before there were water coolers.

Filed July 2, 2007