Doctor Thorne is a
2016 three-part television drama adaptation of the Trollope novel
Doctor Thorne scripted by Julian Fellowes for ITVy . Mary Thorne,
penniless and with undisclosed parentage grows up under the
guardianship of her uncle Doctor Thorne. She spends much of her
formative years in the company of the Gresham family at Greshamsbury
Park estate. As they close on the world of adult cares and
responsibilities, the past starts to impinge and the financial woes
of the Gresham family threaten to tear relationships apart.
Tom Hollander as
Doctor Thorne
Stefanie Martini as
Mary Thorne
Harry Richardson as
Frank Gresham
Rebecca Front as
Lady Arabella Gresham
Richard McCabe as
Frank Gresham Snr.
Ian McShane as Sir
Roger Scatcherd
Alison Brie as Miss
Dunstable
Janine Duvitski as
Lady Scatcherd
Edward Franklin as
Louis Scatcherd
Danny Kirrane as Mr.
Moffatt
Nell Barlow as
Beatrice Gresham
Gwyneth Keyworth as
Augusta Gresham
Phoebe Nicholls as
Countess de Courcy
Tim McMullan as Earl
de Courcy
Kate O'Flynn as Lady
Alexandrina de Courcy
Tom Bell as Lord
Porlock
Nicholas Rowe as
Mortimer Gazebee
Alex Price as
Reverend Caleb Oriel
Cressida Bonas as
Patience Oriel
Ben Moor as Cossett
Jane Guernier as
Janet Thacker
Sean Cernow as Jonah
David Sterne as Mr.
Romer
Ed Cartwright as
Footman
Michael Grady-Hall
as Scatcherd's Footman
Mark Carter as
Moffatt's Heckler
Doctor Thorne
recap: episode one – want a carnival of cleavage? This is your show
Uncle Julian is
back! And, just like Downton Abbey, his new period drama is awash
with heaving-bosom action and cut-glass accents
Viv Groskop
Sunday 6 March 2016 22.00 GMT
Uncle Julian’s
back! And he’s brought Lovejoy with him! If you’ve been missing
Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey scripts (yes, I know you haven’t,
no one has), here’s your chance to get more scheming aunts, rich
heiresses, downtrodden husbands and country estates peeling around
the edges ... They were all here. As was an awful lot of explanatory
detail and very little action or depth of emotion.
Our plot is simple.
Or is it? Actually, it’s not at all. The sister of Lovejoy (the
always brilliant Ian McShane) got pregnant by Doctor Thorne’s
brother. Then Lovejoy killed Doctor Thorne’s brother by hitting him
too hard. The baby, Mary, was adopted by Doctor Thorne (AKA Rev).
Lovejoy doesn’t know about this and has meanwhile become very rich
because of the railways.
Mary grows up and
falls in love with Frank. Frank’s family want him to marry an
American lady for money. Frank wants to marry Mary but he can’t as
Mary has no money. Except Lovejoy has left money “to his sister’s
eldest child” and that child is Mary. So now Mary is rich. Or is
she? Because Lovejoy’s son has to die before she gets anything. And
we haven’t even met him yet. (Does he exist?) Meanwhile, Lovejoy
has lent shedloads of cash to Frank’s family. Can you see where
this might go as long as a certain person (Lovejoy’s son, as yet
unseen) can be dispatched?
It’s all rather
exhausting so far. There was beauty here, as there always is in any
Fellowes costume drama. And with the Weinsteins producing, the
cinematography, wardrobe and glossy details were fabulous. The
Gresham sisters alone were a carnival of cleavage, freshly cut
flowers and cut-glass accents. Very exportable, I’m sure. But what
else is there here apart from surface and a long wait for Mary to
inherit Scatcherd’s fortune?
It’s tricky for
viewers to judge Doctor Thorne as so few will have read the original,
the third novel in Anthony Trollope’s series The Chronicles of
Barsetshire. (Full disclosure: your reviewer includes herself in this
parade of ignoramuses, dear reader.) So it could be argued that any
flaws are simply replicating those of the original. For example, I
wonder if the whole piece is slightly ruined by the fact that we know
the connection between Scatcherd (Lovejoy) and Doctor Thorne (Tom
Hollander) from the beginning. (Which is also the case in the novel.
I, like Uncle Julian, can use Wikipedia.) The suspense lies in how
that 20-year-old connection will be revealed to everyone else. Maybe
that works in a novel. I’m not sure it works as a plot device in a
three-part TV series.
Fellowes’s biggest
challenge in episode one is establishing the characters and the
connections between them. Which means he has to make people say
things such as this: “I thought it would fund me for 30 years or
more. Ten years on and every penny is gone.” No one talks like
this. This is a big problem, having to condense huge swathes of
novelistic exposition into soundbite dialogue. I can see that we need
this information. But there has to be a more subtle way of coming by
it, surely? Characters seem to march into a scene, impart
information, then go away again. But this happened for six years in
Downton Abbey, and it doesn’t seem to have prevented it from
becoming a multi-million-pound international cash cow. So it must
just be me who finds this exceedingly frustrating. Verdict? Enjoyable
enough, but too much exposition. Not enough emotion or comedy. All
the flaws of Downton without the breathing space of six series.
The Rebecca Front
fan club
It’s early days,
but I think it’s safe to say that Rebecca Front (Lady Arabella) is
going to come out of this best. She is the perfect casting and has
the best lines, managing to wring some comedy out of a fairly stiff
(and too fast-moving) script. Obviously, Tom Hollander and Lovejoy
(sorry, Ian McShane) are both excellent. But Lady Arabella is a
richer part. The listening at the door and running away bit was
brilliant, as were her Dame Maggie-level one-liners: “She is called
his niece. And that is all.” “There have been love-makings of a
very advanced kind.”
Corset corner
If you want peachy
heaving-bosom action, this is your series. I thought Lady Augusta’s
mammaries might pop out of her dress at one point. If only there
could be a little more space for the young women here, not only in
terms of bosom but presence: Alexandrina (Kate O’Flynn), Beatrice
(Nell Barlow), Augusta (Gwyneth Keyworth) and the American heiress
Miss Dunstable (Alison Brie) were all superb and I could have watched
a lot more of them. Especially Alexandrina’s wonderful line to
porky beardy Mr Moffat: “At your first mistake, I shall rap you on
the knuckles with my fan.” (I also liked: “I think you might call
him Keith.” He is definitely a Keith. A beardy Mr Creosote kind of
Keith.)
Pug watch
I love that pug.
That is one heavy pug that Rebecca Front has to lug around. It’s
almost bigger than her and the poor footman who took it off her
almost winced with the effort. Worth watching for the pug alone. Give
the pug an Oscar. Although the pug would sit on the Oscar and squash
it.
Doctor Thorne review: Fellowes and Trollope is a happy marriage
BY Ceri Radford
7 MARCH 2016 •
7:58AM
How do you move
forward after writing the world-conquering frock-fest that was
Downton Abbey? Julian Fellowes seems to have found the answer: by
going backwards. His latest series, which opened on ITV last night,
is an adaptation of Anthony Trollope's much-loved novel, Doctor
Thorne. Set in the middle of the 19th century in the fictional
country of Barsetshire, it captures a version of England that would
have been a gleam in the Earl of Grantham's eye: a honeyed land of
foxhounds and ball gowns, squires and steeples.
While Trollope and
Fellowes share a certain wry nostalgia and an interest in the
fictional potential of crumbling dynasties, will the pairing work? In
the language of the novel, it's a marriage between blood (Trollope's
literary pedigree) and money (Fellowes's contemporary clout). Judging
from the first episode, it looks set to be a happy one, helped along
by a fine cast including Tom Hollander in the titular role, Rebecca
Front and Ian McShane.
In an enjoyably
brisk first instalment, Fellowes set the scene: Frank Gresham (Harry
Richardson) had come of age. He was heir to a great estate.
Everywhere you looked, pretty girls with outlandish hair ribbons
(including a fleeting glimpse of Prince Harry’s ex Cressida Bonas,
who plays family friend Patience Oriel) wanted to dance with him. But
he was not happy. His father was hopelessly in debt, he was so poor
he only had one new horse for his birthday, his snobby aunt was
haranguing him to marry for money while he was in love with the lowly
doctor's niece, Mary Thorne (Stefanie Martini).
Said niece,
meanwhile, was having an even worse time of it. Pondering what rank
she might marry (clue: not the heir to a great estate), she badgered
Dr Thorne, her guardian, to tell her the truth about her origins.
Shock one: her mother was an unmarried local girl, seduced by the
good doctor's cad of a brother. Shock two: her mother's brother,
Roger Scatcherd (McShane), then murdered the love-rat in revenge,
which all sounds a bit like a Victorian version of Jeremy Kyle.
Inevitably, Fellowes
has already departed from the novel; condensing the opening chapters
and softening a brutal murder into more of a comical drunken blunder.
But the feel of the novel – the perennial tensions between love and
loyalty, and the benevolent eye watching over it all – was largely
intact.
As the benevolent
uncle, Tom Hollander immediately captured Dr Thorne's peculiar blend
of moral uprightness, humour and professional busyness. Looking after
the Gresham family's bruised finances, Thorne was a straight foil to
McShane's wonderfully scabrous Scatcherd, a bed-ridden drunk. Having
risen from murderous infamy to fortune as a railway tycoon, his
pop-eyed tirades provided a welcome comic note.
And what of
Fellowes' new Mary? She shared a first name and a fiery streak with
her blue-blooded Downton counterpart, but little else. Newcomer
Stefanie Martini – and if that isn't a stage name, she was born
lucky – balanced spark with softness, while her close relationship
with her uncle was particularly convincing. Sadly, it was more
convincing than our first glimpse of her flirtation with Frank, which
involved a lot of giggling but not much else. This was disappointing,
given that she is a wit in the novel and Fellowes normally excels at
eloquent barbs.
The fledgling
romance faced obstacles beyond its plausibility. Frank's mother, Lady
Arabella (Rebecca Front), was opposed. There is something so
intrinsically sympathetic about Front, so reminiscent of a
well-meaning geography teacher, that it was hard to see her as a
haughty roadblock to romance, even though she played a similar role
recently in the superlative War & Peace. Luckily, Lady Arabella's
sister Countess De Courcy (Phoebe Nicholls) did enough disdaining for
the whole family, oozing scorn as naturally as other characters put
one foot in front of the other.
Whatever happens to
Frank and Mary, will Fellowes and Trollope live happily ever after?
The signs are positive. Adaptation plays to Fellowes's strength for
dialogue while curbing his tendency to, say, have a war hero rise
miraculously from his wheelchair only to bite it in a car accident.
Though early for comparison, Doctor Thorne feels akin to the best TV
adaptations of Trollope – The Barchester Chronicles (1982) and The
Way We Live Now (2001). And those ball gowns alone are more than
capacious enough to fill the Downton-shaped hole in our Sunday night
viewing.
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