Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark (Episode 1, after prologue)
Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza singing (also Episode 1)
Of course there has to be an end. Of course. For that is what everyone has faced since the world began. And that is — what do you call it — intolerable. It’s intolerable! So you must not think of it. You must not face it. Because it is a certainty it has to be forgotten. One cannot — one must not — fear a certainty. All we know is this moment and this moment. Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come does not exist yet. That’s tomorrow! it’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask — Demelza to Ross, concluding words of The Angry Tide, almost the last words of the 1977 iteration but not forcefully enough spoken by Angharad Rees)
Friends and readers,
So we have come, alas, to the end of a second iteration of the first seven marvelous Poldark novels of Winston Graham, with Debbie Horsfield transmuting the tragic and stoic pain of the (by no means) darkest of these novels, The Angry Tide, into hope for compromise and renewal (two of our couples, Ross and Demelza Poldark, Dwight and Caroline Enys); healing after the self has been shattered it would seem beyond repair (Drake and now Morwenna Carne); and maddened rage turned into a stone-y acceptance (as George Warleggan stands over the grave of Elizabeth with two of her children in tow, Valentine and Ursula).
Jack Farthing as George Warleggan (the last shot)
We’ve had four years rather than two, and hour long rather than 45-50 minute episodes. One script writer instead of seven. The last two episodes of this iteration were as powerful as found anywhere in contemporary TV drama. It took time for me to recover after both. When I did, I felt sorrow that Turner could not find his way to live in this role for another say three years (which it might have taken for the concluding quartet, Stranger from the Sea, Miller’s Dance, Loving Cup, Twisted Sword; and coda, Bella (Graham originally named it far more appropriately Valentine).
Duelling scene: establishment shot
When seen against the backdrop of the last half of The Four Swans and The Angry Tide (Poldark 6 & 7, the two novels adapted), and the corresponding episodes of the 1977-78 Poldark (Episodes 8-13, scripted by Alexander Baron, John Wiles and Martin Worth), one is driven to same kinds of conclusions as the previous three seasons.
Judy Geeson a much more deeply felt Caroline in the 1977 episodes (Part 10).
At its best the new Poldark provided much much more closely literal transposition; they were much more willing to show the characters deeply disquieted, angry, vexed at one another. Horsfield repeatedly focused on intense vulnerable and angry (and all sorts of) psychological encounters, up-close, up front in ways not quite permitted by the decorum of the 1970s BBC costume dramas. To this was added Ross’s rousing protest against the hanging of innocent and starving men as “examples” (“pour encourager les autres,” as Voltaire famously wrote in Candide), scenes of explicit radical political proposals by Ross in parliament (hinted at in the books and omitted in the 1970s), rousing radical political proposals by Ross in parliament (anachronistically standing on the wrong side of aisle, as otherwise how could he have been protesting against the Tory party as he represents the Tory grandee Boscawen, Lord Falmouth). There was some stunningly memorable photography around the scene of the duel: the landscape seems to go from dissolve to water and back again. Some fine virtuoso acting, showing the BBC still has this in its pocket if it will only give the actors the nuanced lines and the time: it would be invidious to single any one out, but the particularly hard and poignant role of Morwenna was more or less fully realized by Elise Chappell (she was a bit hampered by the determination of Horsfield to squash Graham’s Morwenna’s revulsion against the reincarnation of the man who nightly rapes her sadistically; that is to say, the baby forced on her by Whitworth).
And it’s not that easy to be as purely obnoxious and contemptible while actuated by genuine predatory power as Christian Brassington managed in the thankless role of complacently incessantly corrupt vicious Vicar Whitworth. Robin Ellis appeared a couple of times this season as a slightly softened Rev Halse who condescends to hint to Ross some good advice, and he was joined by another “old-timer” bought back to lend some subtlety to the proceedings: as Sir John Mitford, Adrian Lukis (Wickham in the famed 1995 P&P scripted Andrew Davies), lets George know that his power as a magistrate to arrest someone is not going to be taken over on behalf of George’s personal vendetta.
I felt repeatedly a good feeling engendered across sequences of scenes as the actors now comfortable in their roles and doing (in the fiction) positive useful work together, socializing back in Cornwall. (Socializing in London is presented as in the book something hollow, hypocritical, dysfunctional if the aim were really friendships or building relationships). Good feeling in Episode 3 with the back-and-forth of over-voice for letters between Demelza reporting to Ross how things are going and a very different life from that in London, from which he confiding in her, his voice over turning into flashback vivid scenes. Episode 5 had effective structure, with the unexpected manslaughter of Whitworth, and then the anguished turnaround of Drake (Harry Richardson) from the girl Demelza and his brother, Sam, have engineered him into promising to marry (Rosina) and his feeling of coming promising joy, security, a peaceful existence. Almost immediately he turns back to the now abused grieving girl he has loved so deep he cannot divest himself of a need to protect her, to be with her as his comfort too. They understand one another intuitively. Then the interlace of cruel destructiveness on the part of the ever seething villain George Warleggan sending the monster Harry and the girl’s father to destroy Drake’s forge desolating.
Harry Richardson as Drake seeking Morwenna along the cliff
The home we see he had prepared for himself and Rosina destroyed (Episode 5)
Emma’s return to tell Sam she will marry someone else is full of empathy. She loves him and he her, but his religion is a barrier they will not be able to get past. She will not be accepted by his flock; he will not be able to understand her and she cannot spend her life pretending. She enjoys the more vulgar, coarse man.
At its worst was again shameless fetishizing of Aidan Turner (the prologue to episode 1 was grotesque). As in previous seasons what had been in the books handled in a naturalistic probable way became contrived improbable and melodrama, e.g. in the first episode Drake and Sam Carne wholly innocent of any wrong-doing come close to being hung. Horsfield seems wholly out of sympathy with or cannot understand the development of the character of Demelza as realized across the books. Demelza does not have an affair with Hugh Armitage to revenge herself on or triumph over Ross, or to show power. Eleanor Tomlinson repeated this explanation, suggesting she had not read the books or thought about what adultery means even today. When Ross first married Demelza, it was not after a romantic courtship between equals, but as his servant that he had come to like and be dependent on, but someone also decidedly beneath him, younger than him; Armitage was her first introduction to romance, to poetry. Horsfield has Demelza bicker and Ross become abject (wholly out of character). Horsfield also has Demelza, Demelza (!) inform Drake just before he is to wed Rosina that Whitworth is dead and Morwenna supposedly free. That’s the last thing Demelza would do. She has done everything to bring it about. In this episode he asks Demelza why did she tell him? Good question. In the book he hears from someone else, and himself first tells Rosina and while hurt, she forgives him. Horsfield has Demelza say that she had to tell Drake or he’d have never forgiven her! Who is Demelza considering here? But Drake reproaches this new Demelza, which has the effect of ripping him open again — and so he is until the 8th episode when finally Morwenna freed (by the luck of a miscarriage) comes to him.
This last season was also reduced, made so much shallower by the continual presentation of George as an almost one-dimensional villain, the hater of Ross, with his uncle Cary as a chuckling minor devil. I wish too that Horsfield had not (as the previous Poldark series did) blackened the character of Elizabeth. In the 1970s Jill Townseend was ambitious and of course therefore cold; this time Heida Reed exults in George’s amoral tricks, looking unconcerned on who he hurt. Thus if it was (and I suspect this is so) that Horsfield wanted us to see Elizabeth as wishing her death (as Horsfield has her taking laudanum drops to endure her), she makes it hard for the viewer to feel the pity of the demise of a just and intelligent if conventional woman.
Heida Reed by her mirror contemplating herself and the drug Dr Anselm has given her to bring on early parturition
Still I am among those who wrote to Macmillan saying that if they were to print the scripts from the third and fourth season, I would be eager to buy them. There is much richness and care in this season and my guess is that as with the first two season (where the scripts were published), the script had more potential than was realized. The scripts can help the viewer get past the brevity of the scenes in the actual film which go far more swiftly than reading them does and the continual switch-back-forth is not as distracting.
Was there anything significantly different about this year’s episodes and those of the previous. It seemed to me that Turner had become so comfortable in this role of truly moral hero that at moment he provided a coda to scenes of anguish: as in the previous seasons, Horsfield is not willing to allow any other character to be the one who won out in catastrophe. So in the book it’s Sam who rescues most of the people from a mine flood; here we had to have Ross in the scene; in the book, it’s Drake who flies to retrieve Morwenna from Trenwith and Warleggan; here we had to have Ross come first. Here we have Ross trying to intervene to help Dwight live with whatever grief he has. The eighteenth century liked an exemplary hero who was a strong, good, earnestly emotional man.
Robin Ellis as Ross not invited to the party, the outsider — he was not the same kind of exemplary figure, but far more elusive, look at his steely eyes behind which we sense pain from simply enduring existence on the terms it’s offered
In this scene Monk Adderley snidely takes Ross for a threadbare troubadour (1977 Poldark) — a shallow back-biter
The last three episodes of both Poldarks (1977, 11-13; 2018, 6-8), both taken from the concluding third The Angry Tide can be aligned. Episode 11 (1977) and 6 (2018) both realize the lavish party George throws in Cornwall as a prelude to his coming career in Parliament and in both the socipathic murderer, Monk Adderley (Malcolm Tierney in 1977; Max Bennett, 2018, both uncannily mocking evil) meets Ross talking to Elizabeth in the garden. Alignment as in the previous years show how much has been lost of detailed novelistic complexity in the dramaturgies of the new era where so many events of different types are piled in within an hour when the older dramaturgy actors could develop a single scene a length. The older series took such time to dramatize the ball; while the new one twists and turns over scene after scene with lighthening speed so we can’t savor the build=up to George’s sudden fury and are to ball back on quick shots of the ravaged face of Elizabeth once Geoffrey Charles has pronounced his half-brother, Valentine, as the “spittin’ image of Uncle Ross,” and George has shut her and Valentine out again.
One flaw in the final ending: far too much emphasis was given to Ross’s relationship with Elizabeth as the central thread of the whole series, by going back to the initial prologue of the first episode of the first season. The invented flashback scene to 1780 in the last episode had the effect of giving us time’s perspective and how things turned out so unexpectedly (the one man Elizabeth didn’t marry was Ross) but we are asked to use this material to reduce all that has gone on between. Elizabeth is not the muse of the books. She is one of three major characters to die at or towards the end of each set of books: Francis’s death desolates Warleggan; now Elizabeth’s Angry Tide; and Jeremy at Waterloo in Twisted Sword is not to be gotten over by Demelza ever. It’s these larger patterns within which several story lines go on that matter. Horsfield softens the incompatibility of Dwight’s idea of a meaningful useful life with Caroline’s (in the novel frankly) boredom. She leaves us with a simple easily assimilable pattern and scarcely does justice to the experience she has offered over four years.
The young George and young Francis
At core the Poldark books are melancholy. Ross Poldark is a driven man, angry at the world’s injustice, striking out now and again insanely. Demelza provides for him a center of stability and hopefulness. I thus conclude this blog with Graham’s very last written story, “Meeting Demelza” The text has been published in a magazine long ago, and I cannot find it online but there is an audiobook. “Meeting Demelza.” Graham was near death when he wrote it, and in the story he looks to join his most beloved characters: Ross, Demelza — and Dwight — I just knew he loved Dwight as much as Ross and Demelza (Luke Norris this season began to hit the true note that Richard Morant seemed to capture effortlessly so long ago). It will take 12 minutes to listen to.
A ghost story before we go into that night. Ross (let’s recall) begins as a revenant.
Ellen
