Waugh novel adapted

Press, 2 June 1989, Page 24

Waugh novel adapted

“A Handful of Dust,” the adaption of Evelyn Waugh’s sardonic novel about life among London’s “bright young things” between the wars, will start at the Savoy today. It stars James Wilby (joint winner of the best-actor award for “Maurice” at the 1987 Venice Film Festival), Kristin Scott Thomas, Anjelica Huston, Judi Dench and Alex Guinness.

The director, Charles Sturridge and the producer, Derek Granger, last worked together on the multi-award-winning television series, “Brideshead Revisited,” and it was during the filming in 1979 that Granger introduced the book to the director.

The film tells of a young, happily married couple, Tony and Lady Brenda Last, who live with their small son in the

vast Victorian Gothic country house which has been in the Last family for generations. One week-end, Tony and Brenda inadvertently play host to a penniless socialite, John Beaver, with whom the enchanting Brenda drifts into an affair which drastically changes the course of their lives.

“We started the casting with one overriding idea that Tony, Brenda and Beaver had to be young. It’s the story of a young marriage going suddenly wrong, not about a marriage going stale,” Sturridge said. Waugh’s novel has been translated into six languages — French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian and Slavic — and is currently in its eighteenth imprint.