A Dickens Discovery

“Our Mutual Friend,” a dark and largely forgotten Charles Dickens tale of love and money, will start a new year of PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” on Sunday.

Written in 1864 just six years before the British author died of a stroke, “Mutual Friend” quickly became a hit with readers, according to Sandy Welch, who penned the lavish six-hour adaptation. The miniseries, which first aired on the BBC2 in March, made a similar splash with viewers in Britian, and within 10 days of the first episode’s telecast, the book had landed back on the best-seller list--more than a century later.

“Masterpiece Theatre” is hoping American audiences will also take to “Mutual Friend,” as well as a new version of one of the author’s best-known novels, “Great Expectations,” which will air under the “Masterpiece” nameplate in the spring.

This particular Dickens work, with its intertwining conceits and deceits, is one part Greek tragedy, another part soap opera with British society as its stage.

“This was [initially] published in four [installments],” says Welch, who first read the book when she was 14. “Readers had to hang on a few months between episodes.”

But where other Dickens classics like “Oliver Twist,” “Great Expectations” and “Tale of Two Cities” quickly became a part of popular culture through movies, “Mutual Friend” languished partly because it is such a long and complicated story, Welch believes.

“If you think of all the Dickens we do know, they could easily be adapted into 90 minutes or two hours,” says Welsh. “It’s very difficult to do ‘Our Mutual Friend’ [as a feature film], because it sort of has two of everything.” Including two love stories, which Welsh quickly decided to use as the spine of her adaptation, which is told in six hours.

In one of the love stories, John Harmon (Steven Mackintosh ) discovers that his sizable inheritance is tied to his marrying someone he has never met, the headstrong Bella Wilfer (Anna Friel ). Bella, he soon learns, wants to marry for money, not love.

So Harmon concocts an elaborate plan to win Bella’s heart. It begins with his death, a staged one, which allows him to enter her life as the penniless John Rokesmith secretary to the Boffins (Peter Vaughan and Pam Ferris ). The couple, believing Harmon is truly dead, have inherited his fortune and taken Bella in. And thus does the courtship of Bella begin.

If that weren’t convoluted enough, Dickens offers up a second love story, interwoven with Harmon’s tale. Its central players are the caddish, upper-class lawyer, Eugene Wrayburn (Paul McGann ), and the beautiful, innocent Lizzie Hexam (Keeley Hawes a corpse-robber’s daughter, who Wrayburn has his eye on. But nothing in “Mutual Friend” goes according to plan. Bradley Headstone (David Morrisey ), a working-class schoolmaster, also falls in love with Lizzie, then goes insane when she spurns him.

What is remarkable is that it only takes six hours for Welch to lay the tangled tales out, then unravel them.

Executive producer Catherine Wearing, who studied Dickens in college, acknowledges she never read “Mutual Friend” until Welch approached her about the project. The BBC too became intrigued by the prospect of dramatizing an obscure Dickens work.

“[With] ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or ‘Great Expectations,’ people do know what happens and they have strong feelings about how you realize it,” says Wearing. “With this, it was a slightly different experience for the audience because they didn’t know what happens.”

Audiences’ interest was picqued, Wearing suggests, because “Mutual Friend” turned out to be a bit more shocking than most of Dickens’ novels.

“Headstone on paper is an earnest, working-class man who made good,” says Wearing. “Lizzie should love him and she doesn’t. She loves the extremely ambiguous, upper-class roue.”

“It’s quite a mature book when you think of the heroes and how they are allowed to do quite dark things,” adds Welch, “yet still come out alive at the end which is not always the case [in Dickens’ stories].”

It took Welch nearly a year to write the script and keep all of her favorite characters in the teleplay. “We went around the major strands which were obviously the two love stories,” she says.

She also used attorney Mortimer Lightwood (Dominic Mafham Eugene’s good friend, as the viewers’ guide. “It is a very good way to see the story through his eyes, because his relationship with Eugene is so strong,” says Welsh. “In fact, the reason you like Eugene so much is because Mortimer likes him. We did consciously try to use Mortimer to help us through.”

Welch pruned away many of the subplots including those in which Dickens relentlessly damns London society. “We found that most of the writing about the society is on the same level,” Wearing says. “What we decided was to use them as a kind of chorus to comment on the story.”

What surprised Wearing is the way British viewers responded to the miniseries.

“The people’s reaction to the show has completely reinvigorated my faith in humanity,” she says. And, at least in Britian, she was heartened at the way the miniseries led people back to the original book.

“I had the most extraordinary letters,” says Wearing. One, written by a 74-year-old man who had dropped out of school at 14, stays with her.

“He said,” she recalls, “ ‘It made having a TV worthwhile. I went to a charity shop, and I bought the book and read it.’ He wrote 10 pages to me about what reading ‘Mutual Friend’ meant.”

“Masterpiece Theatre: Our Mutual Friend” airs Sunday-Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV.