By Amit Roy
ANDREW DAVIES said he knew “it would be little tricky” working with Vikram Seth to adapt his novel, A Suitable Boy, into a six-part drama which premiered on BBC1 last Sunday (26).
Davies, whose list of credits includes Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Les Misérables and War and Peace, took part in a webinar last Tuesday (21) last week when he joked: “I generally prefer the writers that I’m working with to be long dead (but) I’m happy to work with writers who are still alive.”
He admitted that working with Seth, who was known to be very protective about his novel, “was always going to be a little bit tricky, but I saw that having read the novel, the guy who wrote such a witty, amusing human story is going to be somebody I’d love to meet – and so it proved.
“We met over a four-hour lunch, by the end of which I, for one, was quite drunk, but I think we were firm friends. It was a pleasure to have Vikram on hand to put me right wherever I started straying because, of course, my experience of India is fairly limited.”
He described his collaboration with Mira Nair, the director of the series which has generally received positive reviews, as “great”.
“We thought it was all worked out and then Mira swept onto the scene, and overwhelmed me, with a lot of extra ideas that enormously enrich the screenplay.
“One of the things she did most was make the politics tell… and she also put a lot more depth into the religious allegiances of the different characters. And that made a very, very rich picture as well.”
Among TV critics, the Daily Mail’s Christopher Stevens, gave the show a maximum five stars on the strength of the first episode.
“To capture the sheer magnitude of his great book on screen, the BBC has assembled an extraordinary cast – some newcomers, other Bollywood superstars,” said Stevens. “Best of them all is Tabu – born Tabassum Fatima Hashmi but so famous in India that she has only one name – who plays the seductive Saeeda Bai.”
He concluded: “The colours of her palatial rooms give her the appearance of a figure in a traditional Indian painting, an impression heightened by the poses struck by the actors.
“Just as vibrant are the eruptions of colour in the clothes, gardens and streets. The flamboyant scenes at a religious festival, where Maan [Kapoor, played by Ishaan Khatter] and his siblings were hurling fistfuls of paint powder, looked like an explosion in the Farrow and Ball factory.
“There has never been a TV drama quite so kaleidoscopic.”
In the Daily Telegraph, Anita Singh said of the story set in 1951: “The 50s detail is lovingly recreated. It’s all deeply romantic. If you think this looks a bit like an Incredible India tourist advert – everything is gorgeous, suffused in golden light – then you would be right. But why not? It’s supposed to be a sumptuous Sunday night drama, not India’s answer to Cathy Come Home.”
In the Radio Times, Flora Carr admitted: “Already I’m in awe at the show’s creators for distilling Vikram Seth’s sprawling novel into six tight episodes – I was lost in the story, and the characters. And not once did I feel I needed to glance at SparkNotes.”
However, Ed Cumming in the Independent found that “for all its good intentions, this is still an orange-filtered fantasy version of India, where the characters speak English with the same mannered Indian accents and nobody can do anything without a sitar twanging.”
But he also said that “A Suitable Boy is bright and comprehensible, thanks to Davies’ well-trained eye for structure and Nair’s unobtrusive direction. While they can’t resist the hoary old attractions of trains and temples – there’s even a Holi festival thrown in – they build a semi-plausible world with a clear story. In this strange year, escaping to a made-up place will suit plenty of viewers just fine.”
During the webinar, Davies was asked whether he had felt pressure adapting a novel which was so globally well known and loved.
“I’m getting used to that kind of thing because people think very highly of War and Peace, for example, and Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch – and I’ve adapted all those. What you have to be (is) not (be) too frightened and too in awe of this.”
He explained the art of adapting the 1,366 pages-long novel: “It’s [about] choosing really; there’s so much in this novel. There is no flab in it at all. There are no boring bits, there are no dull scenes and no boring subplots. It’s all interesting. And so it was a series of painful choices, really, deciding what had to be cut out.
“I went for the emotional stories at the heart of it – with Lata [Mehra, played by Tanya Maniktala] and Maan with Saeeda Bai – and the characters that you love the most. You just express their story in as dramatic a way as possible.
“And I wasn’t, at that time, terribly concerned with making sure I’ve told the story of India accurately because if that was all we did, nobody would watch it.
“I wanted to tell the story of these people as movingly as possible. So that was the process.
“And I would say to lovers of the book, ‘I’m sorry, we couldn’t include it all in six hours.’”
Davies was questioned about “the gay undertone” to the friendship between Maan and Firoz Ali Khan (Shubham Saraf ).
“If you read it (the novel) again, it’s very subtly indicated,” he pointed out. “I think Maan and Firoz have a delightful romantic friendship which at times has become physical. Both (are) on that grade scale that we’re all on from all-out gay to all-out hetero. They’re both striving towards the hetero end of it. But they have a delightful relationship. It’s a romantic friendship that sometimes in the past has been physical. Certainly I’ve been indicating that.”
Davies also offered viewers a piece of advice: “For people who haven’t read the book but love the series, do get the book because there’s almost twice as much story in it as we had room for.”
