BIRDSONG directed by Philip Martin (BBC Television drama, 2012)
Clémence Poésy (Isabelle) and Eddie Redmayne (Stephen)
The last WWI veteran Harry Patch wrote the following in his memoir, The Last Post:
“We were soon back in the trenches …..our living conditions there were lousy, dirty and unsanitary….. there were rats as big as cats, and if you had any leather equipment the damn things would gnaw at it. We had leather equipment – and they’d chew it. If you stood still long enough they’d chew your boot laces”.
How can you hope to capture such horrors of warfare for TV or cinema and still make it watchable? The answer is that you can’t. The most you can do is suggest the kind of atrocities the soldiers had to endure and leave the rest to your imagination.
Nevertheless the lack of a single rat in this otherwise impressive three-hour BBC adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ much-loved novel set during WWI is suspicious. It may be reasonable to eliminate such ugly details but there is no doubt that what remains is a sanitized version of reality.
Abi Morgan knows a thing or two about glossing over the truth as she proved with her screen play to The Iron Lady which made the horror of Margaret Thatcher palatable. Her strategy for bringing Faulks’ fiction to the small screen is to set up a balancing act between a soldier’s experiences in the trenches and his recollections of what she calls his “exquisite love” for Isabella Azaire (Clémence Poésy) in pre-war France (Amiens). The aim was for the romance to have a dreamy, painterly quality as a contrast to the brutality and hardships of life on the front line.
The love story is certainly what works best in this drama. Eddie Redmayne is a fine choice as Stephen Wraysfield and he uses his piercing eyes and impressive cheekbones to good effect. He has a very expressive face so the lingering glances towards Isabella are full of lust and longing. These two have a strong chemistry so their scenes together are sexually charged even when they are fully clothed.
Harry Patch
In the war scenes, Stephen has the permanent gait of one of the walking wounded but despite cheating death several times his striking looks are undamaged. This doesn’t mean that he is under false illusions about heroism or the glory of a war which he describes as “an exploitation of how far men can be degraded”. Isabelle too is injured by a bomb attack on her home but has only is a designer scar that doesn’t ruin her perfect features.
Stephen’s experiences prior to the war have left him hardened on the inside but he retains a strong sense of justice and humanity. This we see mainly through the bond he forges with doomed tunneler, Jack Firebrace (Joseph Mawe) . Firebrace’s dying words carry the moral of the story which is that “to love and be loved is all there is” but given the context it is perhaps better to reflect on Harry Patch’s words based on bitter experience that stand for all human conflicts: “War is a calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings”.
