Word: brideshead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited? The young man whom millions of Britons and Americans know as Jeremy Irons, the lanky star of the TV series based on the novel? Up to a point, as readers of the Times Literary Supplement are discovering this week...
...BRIDESHEAD REVISITED PBS, beginning Jan. 18, 8 p.m., E.S.T. It is an odd book by one of the century's oddest writers, and even he had serious reservations about it. "I reread Brideshead and was appalled," he wrote Graham Greene in 1950, five years after publication. But Brideshead Revisited, overwritten and underplotted, is and probably will remain Evelyn Waugh's best-known and most popular novel, a lush, sentimental tribute to Catholicism and to the period between the wars that Waugh regarded as the last gorgeous days of the British aristocracy. Now, in this lavish and beautiful eleven...
...faults-the over luxuriance, for instance-are also rather appealing. Waugh wrote it during a very bleak period of World War II, and he looked back to his days in Oxford as golden, halcyon." The most expensive TV production ever to come from Britain (about $9.9 million), Brideshead Revisited has a cast that includes John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Mona Washbourne, Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick. Not to mention, of course, that wonderful baroque pile called Castle Howard, which may indeed be the very louse the author saw in his mind when he described the fictional Brideshead...
...young man who does the glimpsing is Brideshead's narrator, Charles Ryder (Irons), who finds his army unit bivouacked by coincidence on the grounds he knows so well. He had been introduced to the house years earlier by one of its inhabitants, Sebastian Flyte (Andrews), an Oxford classmate renowned for "his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds." In the flashbacks arising from Ryder's bittersweet memories, Sebastian gives long, champagne-inspired lunches in his rooms and, in an extravagant undergraduate fantasy, carries with him everywhere a large Teddy bear...
...beginning, Charles' enchantment with Sebastian and the Marchmains' way of life is infectious, and the first several hours of Brideshead are a glorious feast-even better, no doubt, than those served up in Sebastian's rooms at Christ Church college. The acting is scrupulous. Gielgud's scenes with Irons in the Ryder dining room in London are small comic masterpieces of timing and nuance. Olivier's grand scenes come at the end, when Lord Marchmain comes home to die at Brideshead...