TELEVISION: Andrew Worsdale
CAUSE Celebre — made in 1988 for Britain’s ITV, and to be screened on SABC3 next week — – is an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s acclaimed play of the same name. The play is, in turn, based on the true story of glamorous Alma Rattenbury, accused, along with her 18- year-old lover George Bowman, of murdering her elderly husband, architect Francis Rattenbury, in Bournemouth in 1935.
Shot in a studio with three cameras, and with several exterior scenes complete with period cars and London buses, the two-part mini- series’s execution is near perfect. Helen Mirren, who has always excelled in sweaty femme fatale roles — from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover to The Comfort of Strangers — is wonderful as Alma, a flighty woman who defied the conventions of her day with her lack of snobbishness and her open-mindedness, loving her husband totally even while conducting an affair.
Less successful is David Morrissey as the young lover. His northern navety becomes irritating, and by the end you think he’s just an adolescent jerk — but maybe that was Rattigan’s intention.
Holding up the fort in the supporting roles are the formidable Harry Andrews, in what must have been one of his last roles, as the husband, and the superb David Suchet as Mirren’s counsel in one of his first leading parts — he went on to produce the only decent South African accent in Cry Freedom, and recently arrived in Hollywood with roles in Quiz Show and Get Shorty.
The whole piece is reverently but suspensefully adapted by Ken Taylor, who was also responsible for The Jewel in the Crown, and tautly directed by John Gorrie.
What nagged in my mind while watching this rather quaintly theatrical drama is why, for my TV licence’s sake, have the bigwigs at the SABC not commissioned TV versions of our own great dramas? Apart from Janet Suzman’s adaptation of Othello and Manie van Rensburg’s The Native Who Caused All the Trouble, little or nothing has been screened on our televisions that reflects our great theatrical heritage. It makes those commissioning editors at the SABC seem even more inept than a thousand Honeytowns testify to.
Two-part mini-series Cause Celebre is on SABC3 on April 17 and 18 at 7pm