Monthly column on the arts: Gormenghast reaches TV

Regarded by many as a triumph and by many more as a big-budget disaster, BBC2's adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast was never going to please everybody. Peake's trilogy has always been an acquired taste; hardly ever out of print, it has nevertheless been very much a cult. Some who love it most are hopping mad that it was televised, because now everybody will be reading it.

The TV series featured over 100 sets, using the resources of computerised illusions and exhaustive research. The biggest problem was how to portray Gormenghast itself - the rambling castle-township, dominated by inexorable rules and dead tradition, into which Titus, the 77th Earl of Groan is born and from whose depths the rebellious scullery slave Steerpike rises to threaten Gormenghast in its entirety.

Peake was born in China in 1911, later moving to London where he was an art student. The film's designer, Christopher Hobbs, believes that the rigid society portrayed in the trilogy is modelled on China's Forbidden City. His Gormenghast lies under clear skies, its towers and battlements fairy-like in the hazy mist (model exteriors were submerged in a tank of water and shot against painted backdrops). There are gardens and greenery, and a great deal of colour and pageantry.

That's my first grumble about this lavish production, for many of us see Gormenghast as a bleak grey edifice, unrecognisable in the Camelot-like Hobbs exteriors, and I suspect some of the exterior vistas owe more to the producer's knowledge of China than to Peake's text. There's grounds for both opinions in what Peake wrote, but I don't think that the TV version has captured the true spirit of Gormenghast.

Pantomime?

Another reservation is that much of Peake's bizarre surrealism was turned into pantomime, sometimes superbly: the doll-like Clarice and Clara were made up, costumed and rehearsed to catch exactly the chilling tone of Peake's dialogues, and John Session's Prunesquallor (what names Peake gave them!) was masterly. But Barquentine - in the books, the shrivelled, crippled master of ancient ceremony - bawled and ranted quite unlike the character in the books. The retainer Flay (brilliantly played by Christopher Lee) really touches the essence of Peake's macabre, drained shadowiness. The key is in Peake's own illustrations for the books: one rarely felt that his own vision was reflected in the TV version. Even Steerpike was played by an actor who had more of Hollywood than Peake about him, managing even in his final disfigurement to look quite glamorous in a Phantom of the Opera way.

Worst were the schoolmasters. Headed memorably by Spike Milligan and Stephen Fry, the rest were a collection of very recognisable alternative comedians and character actors who badly overacted and generally had themselves a good time. The coarsening of Peake's delicately-drawn vision - a common casualty of TV adaptations of anything - was most obvious here, in the translation of Peake's carefully chosen bad language into a torrent of modern expletives which were, as is the way with much TV comedy, considered to make the character hilarious. One may regret the use of bad language per se, but at least Peake wasn't letting it do all the work for him.

To have Peake's masterpiece on TV at all, albeit flawed, is welcome, even if the producers seemed to be spending money like dome impresarios. It became very fine towards the end, culminating in a terrifying finale, very faithful to the book.

Spiritual outlook

But it failed most, I think, to capture the spiritual bleakness at the trilogy's heart - a bleakness due partly to Peake's deteriorating mental health (he never fully recovered from his experiences as a war artist in the newly-liberated Belsen), and partly to his spiritual outlook. I believe that Gormenghast, with its dead rituals ruled by ancient individuals out of touch with ordinary people, is not drawn from Peake's childhood in China, but is a savage attack on Catholicism: walled, towered, ritualised Gormenghast is the Vatican City.

Peake's view of religion can be seen sharply in his extremely oppressive short story 'Boy in Darkness', the themes of which are expanded in his novel Mr. Pye, which shows good and evil struggling for equilibrium in the soul of a bewildered mortal. It seems to take place outside the moral world of conventional good and evil. Peake is a dualist; he is very good at portraying the damage evil does, but less so at portraying the power of good. Nobody is really redeemed in Gormenghast; one can only run away.

In that respect, this exciting and very well-crafted production faithfully mirrors the heart of Peake's message, deliberate or implied. Others may have got closer to the visual heart of the book and its characters, but there's not much more hope to be found in Peake's world.

David Porter

© Evangelicals Now - March 2000
Please consider supporting this ministry by subscribing.