Love in the Time of Collars

Don’t fear “Middlemarch.”

That’s the word from Louis Marks, the producer of the new “Masterpiece Theatre” series that begins this week on PBS. He hopes American audiences won’t be turned off because the six-part drama is based on George Eliot’s 700-plus page, classic 19th-Century British novel, which was more than likely required reading in high school.

“The guiding light is not to be a period drama,” says Marks, who also produced the “Masterpiece Theatre” presentations of Eliot’s “Silas Marner” as well as “A Day at the Fair” and “Memento Mori.”

“I banned the expression BBC classic drama because I think it sets up all sorts of bad feelings of costumes and period scenery. You have to set it in this time, but make it all very sort of unobtrusive. We have a wonderful costume designer who never talks about costumes. He talks about clothes and the people just wear clothes. “

Set in rural England of 1830, “Middlemarch” focuses on two characters: Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey) and Tertius Lydgate (Douglas Hodge). Dorothea is a passionate and idealistic young woman who becomes trapped into a loveless marriage with the Rev. Edward Casaubon (Patrick Malahide), an impotent clergyman scholar who is insanely jealous of the attention paid to Dorothea by his young cousin, Ladislaw (Rufus Sewell).

Tertius is a well-meaning doctor married to the beautiful but ruthless social climber Rosamund Vincy (Trevyn McDowell), whose spending causes the couple’s downfall. Robert Hardy (“All Creatures Great and Small”) also stars as the dimwitted Arthur Brooke, the uncle of Dorothea and her sister Celia (Caroline Harker).

Shot on location in Lincolnshire and Dorset in England and in Rome, “Middlemarch” harks back to such lavish period pieces as “The First Churchills,” “Elizabeth R” and “The Jewel in the Crown,” which dominated “Masterpiece Theatre” during its first decade.

“Middlemarch” stayed on the BBC back burner for quite a while, but never moved to the table. “The will to do it is something which has grown up in the last few years because there have been changes in the BBC,” Marks explains. “There’s been a feeling that the BBC has to assert its individual voice. One of the things the BBC has to do is celebrate the great works of our culture and background.”

And that means producing big projects, rather than smaller miniseries. “There’s been a great mass of miniseries which have lasted two or three episodes,” Marks says. “Some of them have been good, but the BBC felt there was a need to make a big impact with something that is a major novel.”

Over the last 20 years, Marks says, “Middlemarch” has been viewed as the major English novel of the 19th Century, even surpassing the works of Charles Dickens. “There was a period when everybody thought of an English novel, they thought of Dickens. ‘Middlemarch’ is a much different novel, such a psychologically modern work somehow.”

And a realistic one as well.

“The people have jobs and they know exactly their place in their societies and what they are after and what they are about,” he notes. “That somehow matches our mood today. The book suddenly seems to be very accessible and very real and very true to the present time.”

Director Anthony Page (“Bill,” “The Patricia Neal Story”) agrees with Marks. He was “knocked out” by the novel when he read it 20 years ago. “I don’t think it’s really a book for teen-agers,” he explains. “It seemed to be like a French or Russian novel, dealing with marriage and relationships between men and women. It is sort of unsentimental, sort of ferocious compared to Dickens, who gets sort of sentimental.”

Page believes Eliot’s “strange life” influenced her writing. Eliot, the pseudonym of author Marian Evans, “was cut off from her family because she stopped being a practicing Christian and she lived with a married man. She was very much ostracized by conventional society.”

Evans was making a stance by pretending to be a male writer: She would not let herself be classed along with those she mocked in an essay as “silly lady novelists.” She was also very aware of her scandalous personal life and had no desire for more publicity.

“She had an incredible objective viewpoint on humans,” Page says. “I think she’s a wonderful dramatist. The problem is how to fit it into 6 1/2 hours. Fortunately, we had a lot of time to cook the script.”

When Marks began working on “Middlemarch” nearly two years ago, he read the book again to ascertain how it could be interpreted for the small screen. He discovered “Middlemarch” didn’t need reinterpretation.

“It took me a week to read it. When I finished, I put the book down and walked around the garden and thought, ‘This is amazing.’ Some of the scenes in the novel were perfect film scenes. The dialogue works in the way that good film dialogue works, where you feel there are forces that work through the scene. She doesn’t write explicit dialogue; she writes dialogue which is true but dramatically powerful, because it’s working on different levels.”

To adapt the novel, Marks brought in Andrew Davies, who penned the contemporary “Masterpiece Theatre” political thrillers “House of Cards” and “To Play the King.”

“Andrew’s great thing is that he’s not for revering the text,” Marks says. “We were lucky we had three months to work on the script. Every day we met, we went through a page at a time of the script and the book. The fights (we had) were about how much can you have of George Eilot, while keeping it entertaining. The script was a kind of result of those fights. It was an interesting tension of how far can you go to modernize something without betraying the real value of the original.”

The mammoth “Middlemarch” cast is made up of veteran British actors and newcomers. The auditioning process was extensive. “We got them to read from the book rather than the script,” Page says. “The scenes are longer and more complicated and gives them a chance to explore the emotions. I just went (on auditioning) until the right person turned up.”

Such as Juliet Aubrey, who plays Dorothea. “We have had quite a few screenings back home in England and people say she is close to the Dorothea in the book,” Marks says. “Harold Pinter’s wife, (writer) Antonia Fraser, who is a great ‘Middlemarch’ buff, came to a screening. Afterward, she wrote me a note saying she was transfixed by Juliet’s performance. She captured the essence of this girl, a restless, idealistic spirit, who wants to make her life worthwhile and, because of that, makes the most terrible mistake of marrying this dried-up old scholar.”

The grueling schedule tested Page’s stamina. “We started working on it in September ’92 and it’s literally been six days a week since then to get it done. When the filming began I had to become monastic. I had to stay in the hotel, not drink and go to bed early. It became like a long-distance race.”

But he enjoyed every minute of it. “I love the book so much; it’s such an extraordinary piece of work because of what it tells you about people. In that way, it was like being buoyed up. It was like surfing. It produces energy because you believe in it so much. I think everyone got rather possessed by it.”

“Middlemarch” begins Sunday at 8 p.m. on KVCR and 9 p.m. on KCET and KPBS; April 10 at 8 p.m. on KOCE.