Eddie Redmayne stars in Birdsong. Photo credit: BBC
The BBC’s long-gestating adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ beloved novel Birdsong has taken twenty years to come to TV screens but it’s well worth the wait. That’s the resounding verdict from the critics, who have lavished praise on the two-part WW1-set tale of love and war, which begun last night and concludes next Sunday.
The drama switches between two contrasting settings: hero Stephen Wraysford’s (Eddie Redmayne) youthful trip to rural France – all picnics, boating and romps with Isabelle, his host’s unappreciated wife (Clémence Poésy) – and, later, his experiences in the terrifying First World War trenches.
An ‘intensely moreish’ adaptation. In a five-star review, Andrew Billen of The Times (£) said Birdsong is a “blatant assault on the heart” which is “overwhelming.” What makes Birdsong stand out, said Billen, is how screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Hour, The Iron Lady, Shame) has radically adapted the well-loved book: “… by turning the story from a sequential history into a narrative with two time schemes, Morgan made something intensely moreish. Just when you felt you could not bear another minute’s horror, particularly the heat of the tunnels beneath the front, the action changed to the shaded, pastoral warmth of the romance between Stephen and Isabelle … When the romance and jeopardy of the adultery heated up, a return to the war came as a sobering up.”
Very sexy performances. Sam Wollaston at The Guardian said the war scenes are “extraordinary – a meticulous portrayal of life in the trenches”, and praised screenwriter Morgan for perfectly representing the “terror and the tedium” of trench warfare. Wollaston said hot young British actor Redmayne is “excellent” as central character Wraysford and also heaped praise on Clémence Poésy: “There’s actually something feline about both of them, beautiful, silky, aristocratic cats, longing to get their claws into each other – in a good way … Redmayne and Poésy are perfect together, they’re credible, they fit – emotionally and physically. I remember finding the sex in the book awkward; here it seems natural, right. And very sexy. [Exhales, wipes brow.]”
Redmayne is perfect. Grace Dent at her The Guardian TV OD column insisted that Birdsong “is remarkable. Unsettling, visceral, a shell-shocked fug of love, loss, then more loss, then the brink of despair, with anything left then battered and blown up again.” Dent opined that, “Redmayne is perfect. I’m sure many might disagree: can any actor really live up to the tricky task of playing this stilted soul living with a broken heart in a mind-melting era? Luckily, Redmayne possesses one of those unquenchably intriguing bone structures which allows a camera to rest upon it for large expanses of time, hoovering up each blink as he works through the various milli-stages of his grim journey.”
Redmayne’s ambisexual cheekbones. Serena Davies of The Daily Telegraph hailed the BBC’s “lush, languorous two-part treatment” to be “a triumph.” Davies said that Redmayne is “too beautiful, in one way, for this muddy, bloody tale of collapsing tunnels and exploded skulls. But in another way, his beauty helped … At first I felt a bit cheated by all this elegance: it is not what Faulks did in the book, whose key power came from the realism of the trench scenes, not polished prose. But on reflection, what (director Philip) Martin – and Redmayne’s ambisexual cheekbones – gave us instead was a war at one remove, where we could stand back and contemplate the abstract – its tragedy, its alienation, its despair – without getting too mired in the filth.” Davies applauded the BBC for having done something important: “they have made an elegiac, lyrical film (that is better than Spielberg’s War Horse) with which the next generation can associate the war.”
(Preditable) Twitter outrage. Dent wearily predicted that, as is often the case, fans of the book will object to the adaptation: “Fans of the text already preparing to flood Twitter and Points Of View (let’s face it, the two forums share many attributes), wailing that their ‘speshalbookywook has been gone dirtied’ need to prepare themselves for the fact that one whole plotline – Elizabeth and Robert in the 70s – has been cut entirely to leave just the leaner, darker love story of Stephen and Isabelle.” There were indeed a few moaning on Twitter as the show went out. “Gosh, after all that time and effort Birdsong was just. so. dull”, tweeted food blogger James Ramsden. “Birdsong becomes significantly less watchable when you notice Clemence Poesy’s sex face is a dead ringer for Noel Fielding”, observed The Daily Telegraph film reviewer Robbie Collin on Twitter.
