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. Continue reading
