'Rainbow’ dramatisation not for the cognoscenti

Press, 17 May 1989, Page 15

'Rainbow’ dramatisation not for the cognoscenti

A.K. Grant

on television

I am not a fan of D. H. Lawrence. He is one of those writers who insist on your seeing things his way.

All good writers do this to some extent, but there are ways of going about it which don’t get up your nose, and there are ways of going about it which do get up your nose, and Lawrence’s is the latter way. He doesn’t give you a chance to make up your mind to see things his way; he hectors and lectures at you and badgers you into seeing things his way.

So it was with some misgivings that I started to watch “The Rainbow,” the three-part Mobil Masterpiece theatre which has just concluded on One. And a strange thing happened. I got keener and keener on it as it progressed, whereas people I know who do like Lawrence started to shuffle their feet and look sideways whenever I asked them if they were enjoying it. They muttered about it being “slowmoving” or “not faithful to the book,” and clearly the show was not a hit among the cognoscenti. Which shows, I suppose,

the value of not having read the book before you see the film.

It is obviously Lawrence’s prose which gets to the people who like him, and his stories and his dialogue leave a lot to be desired if you are a fan and are watching a film. Whereas if you. are not a fan and choose to know very little about Lawrence, apart from, like everybody else, having read the good bits in “Lady Chatterley’s

Lover,” you can appreciate a dramatisation of one of his books without feeling there is something missing. So it was with "The Rainbow.”

Imogen Stubbs was absolutely divine as Ursula Brangwen (what a silly name, Lawrence was no good on names); she was almost as beautiful as the English countryside by which she was surrounded.

Stuart Burge is one oi the most honoured names in British film and television, and his hand had lost none of its cunning. The story was somewhat random: boy meets girl, girl meets woman, boy meets girl again, girl gets frightened by horses, a rainbow appears at the end. But there were lots of lovely images, lots of good acting, a satisfactory amount of nudity and the occasional interesting line. Almost my only complaint about the show was that it wasted that very fine actor Tom Bell, who as Old Tom was only, called upon to drown.

It is true that Tom Bell is very good at drowning. He first came to public attention doing a bit of drowning in a pantomime

at Cleethorpes. From there he went on to do drowning parts at the Crucible theatre, Sheffield, during the intervals between snooker. Peter Hall invited him to drown for the Royal Shakespeare Company and he had several memorable seasons at Stratford and the Aldwych. Dr Jonathan Miller directed him in some superb drowning in his production of “The Tempest” for the National Theatre, and he has done guest drowning at the Comedie Francaise, the Moscow Arts Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble. But there is more to Tom Bell than drowning and it is a pity we were not shown it in “The Rainbow.”

No matter. When the show was over I felt that sense of virtue which you don’t get from most television: a sort of smugness at having valuably occupied one’s time in watching a piece of serious television which was very well made. One has absorbed, as it were, a cultural artefact, and is the better for it. And, as I say, there was lots of utterly justifiable nudity thrown in. What more could one ask?