(3 of 4)
A sterling cast handles nearly all of Jewel's haunted souls with understated urgency. As the gawky Daphne, Wooldridge is a particular marvel. Eyes wide and full of a startled innocence, she galumphs through life with such sweet diffidence that plainness itself seems radiant. An equally luminous pathos surrounds Dame Peggy Ashcroft's Barbie Batchelor, a sad little figure of baffled devotion who has little to do save muddle through her final days "very tired and old and far from home."
As the third of Scott's mild and curious heroines, a sort of professional consoler to be found at the bedsides of the series' variously suffering characters, Geraldine James is unremittingly sensible. So too is Charles Dance as Guy Perron, the thoughtful, soft-spoken officer with whom she feels rapport. But the most dominant of all the performances is that of Pigott-Smith as Merrick. Holding together the entire series with the black magic of a self-made lago, he is a picture of twisted pride and prejudice, his face permanently pinched, his upper lip invariably quivering toward a sneer.
The initiators of the series, Britain's Granada Television, approached the adaptation of Jewel with a method that seemed like madness. Half of the episodes were directed by Television Veteran Christopher Morahan, 55 (Uncle Vanya, Old Times), the other half by Jim O'Brien, 37, who has directed a number of documentaries and theatrical productions. In addition, the film makers decided to brave four months' shooting on location in India, an adventure that involved wrangling 300 containers of equipment past vigilant customs officers, recruiting local beggars to act as extras and running up a tab of $7 million.
The adapters' most daunting task, however, was unraveling the elaborately contrapuntal structure of Scott's novels. Scott, whose work won much of its success after his death from cancer in 1978 at age 57, was a former British army officer with three years' experience in India. Less a fluent stylist than a ferociously honest and fair-minded observer, he was determined to do justice to both sides of the equation in British India. In order to portray the Empire in the round, he told his almost 2,000-page story through a complex symphony of flashbacks, fast-forward prolepses and as many as 13 perspectives on a single incident.
But what was all encompassing on the page would have been all confusing on the screen. To the rescue came two other former soldiers from the raj, Scriptwriter Ken Taylor and Sir Denis Forman, the chairman of Granada and the project's prime mover. Their no-nonsense solution was to chop up yard-length segments of wallpaper, pin them on the walls of a large room and sort out a chronological story line by writing an outline of events on each square. In the process, they preserved nearly all the equivocal situations and ragged-edged characters that are often more eloquent than Scott's words.