Middlemarch
The Daily
Telegraph, 15th July 1968, Sylvia Clayton
No woman writer has ever peopled a whole countryside with living characters as vividly as George Eliot did in ‘Middlemarch’. By the end of her long, spacious novel they are as familiar as neighbours.
The seven-part television version by Michael
Voysey, which began on BBC2 on Saturday, can offer only a lightning tour of
this Victorian provincial landscape, flitting at speed from one family to
another.
One figure emerged with singular clarity from the
first episode the young heroine Dorothea Brooke, whose warm idealism animates
the book. Michele Dotrice, her eyes alight with hopeful intelligence, projected
most sensitively Dorothea’s innocence and vulnerable pride.
Dorothea’s idealism blinds her to the failings of
the dried-up elderly scholar Mr Casaubon, Philip Latham, a personable actor
familiar from ‘The Troubleshooters’ was here completely miscast for he does not
suggest a repellent presence or academic ambition.
Michael Pennington, an eternal student whom
television must soon allow to graduate, made a brief attractive appearance as
Mr Casaubon’s young cousin. Derek Francis, more at home as a decisive villain
in ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, played the irresolute dilettante Mr Brooke with quirky
humour and Fabia Drake patronised the lower orders as the Rector’s wife.
Joan Craft, a director with fine sense of period,
and David Conroy were responsible for the production.
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