The Honourable Schoolboy on R4
Feb. 12th, 2010 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylHaving finally caught the last episode of Radio 4's dramatisation of Le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy, I now feel able to pronounce it good. The performances, as with all the dramatisations in the Smiley series, were consistently excellent. Simon Russell Beale was as great as ever and Maggie Steed was absolutely note perfect as Connie Sachs; while Hugh Bonneville and Daisy Haggard both managed to inhabit their damaged and doomed characters worryingly well.
As the only Smiley novel I can remember in any detail — I re-read it at Christmas — I caught myself mentally checking off some of the things lost or changed in the abridgement process. I particularly missed the mordant humour of the original, particularly in the early sections with the war-crazed reporters.
I also noticed that they'd taken the opportunity to make a few changes to George Smiley's character — something I suspected they'd done in Tinker, Tailor too. In the novel, the ultra-secretive Smiley is so silent and self-contained that he is almost an absence at the heart of the story. Thus, there is a constant confusion over whether George really knows exactly what is going on, whether he is making the right decisions by pure chance and whether he realises that Enderby and Martello are conspiring together. But the in dramatisation, Smiley often updates Guillam, taking him to a briefing with Oliver Lacon where, in the novel, Guillam is only present because, having driven George to the Lacons' house, George is unable to bring himself to insist that Peter remains in the car while he and Oliver discuss secrets over the supper table.
But I don't disagree with the alterations. They were almost certainly necessary in order to get the drama of the book to work on radio and were more in the way of tweaks and adjustments than wholesale changes. And they also gave Simon Russell Beale a chance to really inhabit Smiley's character, which can be nothing but a good thing...
As the only Smiley novel I can remember in any detail — I re-read it at Christmas — I caught myself mentally checking off some of the things lost or changed in the abridgement process. I particularly missed the mordant humour of the original, particularly in the early sections with the war-crazed reporters.
I also noticed that they'd taken the opportunity to make a few changes to George Smiley's character — something I suspected they'd done in Tinker, Tailor too. In the novel, the ultra-secretive Smiley is so silent and self-contained that he is almost an absence at the heart of the story. Thus, there is a constant confusion over whether George really knows exactly what is going on, whether he is making the right decisions by pure chance and whether he realises that Enderby and Martello are conspiring together. But the in dramatisation, Smiley often updates Guillam, taking him to a briefing with Oliver Lacon where, in the novel, Guillam is only present because, having driven George to the Lacons' house, George is unable to bring himself to insist that Peter remains in the car while he and Oliver discuss secrets over the supper table.
But I don't disagree with the alterations. They were almost certainly necessary in order to get the drama of the book to work on radio and were more in the way of tweaks and adjustments than wholesale changes. And they also gave Simon Russell Beale a chance to really inhabit Smiley's character, which can be nothing but a good thing...
