A Moody Swirl of Dickens

By Richard Zoglin

The novel opens, famously, with fog: the dense murk that envelops London but settles thickest around the High Court of Chancery. Out of it swirls a teeming cloud of characters and incidents: a lawsuit that has been droning on for years, now grown "so complicated that no man alive knows what it means." An upper-class lady hiding a dark secret. Orphaned children, greedy adults, blackmailing lawyers, a detective story, a reunion and several untimely deaths (one of them by spontaneous combustion). The sheer scope of Charles Dickens' great novel Bleak House presents a daunting task for any adapter. But the BBC version that begins next week on PBS' Masterpiece Theatre cuts brilliantly through the mists to create what may well be TV's dramatic event of the year.

Faint praise, perhaps, at a time when network mini-series have sunk to the soap-opera drivel of North and South and Kane & Abel. But Bleak House is also a step above the general run of tony, tasteful and sometimes tedious British drawing-room dramas that arrive regularly on these shores. There is, for one thing, scarcely a drawing room to be found. The beautifully detailed production moves with ease from the grand country estate of Lord and Lady Dedlock (Robin Bailey and Diana Rigg) to the drab chambers of Chancery and into the sad, grimy streets of London slums. South African Director Ross Devenish shot much of the drama in moody semidarkness, with scenes lit only by the soft glow of a lantern or the flickering of candlelight.

Squeezed into eight relatively succinct hours, Arthur Hopcraft's adaptation tidies up the sprawling novel a bit. One regrets the loss of a few of Dickens' colorful minor characters, along with much of his humor. (Where, for instance, is Mrs. Jellyby, that ardent philanthropist who ignores her sorry children while campaigning to help the natives of Borrioboola-Gha?) Bleak House was, perhaps, not meant to be quite as bleak as this.

Yet the main story line is sturdily intact, Dickens' cry of outrage at society's injustice is heard loud and clear, and some memorable characters are brought to glorious life. Rigg, as Lady Dedlock, is a model of aristocratic propriety starting to crack as her world threatens to unravel. Suzanne Burden as the heroine, Esther Summerson, is just as sweet, sensible and faintly dull as Dickens portrayed her. Den-holm Elliott, as Esther's kindly guardian John Jarndyce, invests a quiet role with remarkable compassion and grace.

Rarely have cast and characters seemed so ideally matched from top to bottom. Jonathan Moore, looking like a foppish John Belushi, is Mr. Guppy, the ambitious law clerk who makes a hilariously premature proposal of marriage to Esther. Sylvia Coleridge is Miss Flite, the daft old regular at Chancery, who collapses one day and tingles with joy at being carried home by "the principals in Jarndyce and Jarndyce." Each takes part in what Vladimir Nabokov described as Dickens' "magic democracy," where even the tiniest characters have a vivid afterlife. This Bleak House, like the London fog of old, is hard to shake. --By Richard Zoglin