It’s back. Eighty-seven years since it was first published, and more than half a century since it was the subject of an infamous obscenity trial, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is being revived in a BBC drama that is as much a reflection on today’s society as the between-the-wars Britain that obsessed DH Lawrence.
The lavish 90-minute drama stars James Norton as Lord Clifford Chatterley and Holliday Grainger as his wife, Constance, who embarks on a torrid affair with their gamekeeper, the former miner Oliver Mellors. It was Lawrence’s graphic description of their relationship that led to the prosecution of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act in 1960 and made famous the passionate encounters between Constance and Mellors.
But while many previous productions have sought to paint Clifford, paralysed and impotent after being injured in the first world war, as an ogre, the writer and director Jed Mercurio has furnished him with a back story that makes the disintegration of his marriage heart-wrenching. In so doing, Mercurio brings the character of Constance to the centre of the drama, focusing on the near impossible choice she has to make between the two men, and projecting her as a modern, complex character.
“When we meet them [the Chatterleys] at the start of the book, they are already in the middle phase of their life, we meet them effectively slowly dying in this stately home and I wanted to go back to them falling in love,” Mercurio said. “I wanted to see what they expected the future to be. I think if you just start with Sir Clifford being disabled and very bitter it makes you wonder why she married him. By seeing him as a very dashing young man and both of them having these great hopes for the future, as so many of that generation had, seeing that completely destroyed by the war felt for me like an emotional launching-off point that maybe some people don’t immediately bring to mind when they think of the book.”
Sarah Cullen, the film’s producer, said Mercurio is making the novel relevant to today’s society while remaining faithful to its most important themes.
“Jed’s vision for the book was to contemporise a relationship that was recognisable to an audience today, but to do that by looking at a class divide and a woman’s choice. It’s about a woman who becomes empowered. She makes a choice and we make that choice hard for her because the options are both strong.”
Lawrence purists may blanche at Mercurio’s revisionism, but he insists he is being true to the spirit of Lawrence.
“When I was looking at constructing scenes that told the story, some things that were just a paragraph ended up becoming full sequences in order to dramatise them and let the audience into the characters’ lives,” Mercurio said. “I wanted to go back to the book but also think about what Lawrence was trying to say, not just in that book, but what he said elsewhere, to tell a story that felt very modern in terms of the fact that, sometimes in relationships, people wrestle with their conscience, the heart fights the head and vice versa, but also putting Lady Chatterley, Constance, at the centre of it, making her a much more thinking person, much more decisive and bringing out her dilemma.”
Norton, who recently appeared in Life in Squares, the BBC drama about the Bloomsbury Group, said he hoped the film would confront people’s preconceptions about Clifford’s character. “To change everyone’s view of him made the story so much more contemporary and relevant. I think as an actor it’s crucial to like the person you play, however weird and disturbed they are, and I deeply loved Clifford. I felt he was a tragic victim of the war and his social conditioning. I felt like he and Constance would have gone on and had a very happy relationship if he had not had the injury. I think Jed’s adaptation has made something that was black and white into something a bit more grey, very contemporary and more realistic.”
That celebrated obscenity trial, in which the jury gave a unanimous not-guilty verdict, was credited as the start of a new, liberal era, but viewers tuning in next month for titillation may be best advised to look elsewhere. While there are a couple of mildly raunchy scenes between Mellors, played by Richard Madden, who has starred in Game of Thrones, and Grainger, who played Estella in Mike Newell’s adaptation of Dickens’s Great Expectations, Mercurio said he was at pains not to focus heavily on either the novel’s sexual content or its prodigious use of swearing.
“It doesn’t excite me to write some swearing or sex scenes because they don’t have emotional context,” Mercurio said. “What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional lives of the characters. Lawrence introduced those elements into his book at a time when he felt a great desire and responsibility to push the boundaries of artistic expression. I’m fortunate I’m not in that position. If I want to write those things no one is stopping me. But that wasn’t the case for Lawrence.”
