With celebrations for Dickens’s 200th birthday underway, Sophie Taylor interviews screenwriter, Sarah Phelps on her recent BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, whilst desperately avoiding the urge to ask for Douglas Booth’s number.
Q: Why do you think Dickens is still so popular today?
A: Well… he’s readable. I suppose my first answer has to be a question – is he so popular or does he just lend himself so well to adaptation? It’s definitely hard to imagine not having him as part of the canon; not having him would be like not having Jane Austen. I think his success stems from his often furious engagement with the world as he saw it; thefrankly lunatic plotting, his ability to cut away verbiage and address inequities as he saw them, with a fast engagement with the prejudice towards children as a core to his work.
Q: How did you feel when you were approached to adapt such a classic piece of literature? Were you nervous?
A: Not at all. I approached them actually. I wanted to write the screenplay very much. I’d adapted Oliver Twist for the BBC and enjoyed it and so I badgered them for four or five years. The stars eventually came into alignment and I was able to do it! ‘Classic’ as a term is sometimes a little subjective, almost as though it’s been invented to sound intimidating. I didn’t allow that to bother me. I just found the prospect exciting.
A: I think I’d say Miss Havisham. She’s just so rich; rich in the sense that there is so much to explore in her character. I also love Nancy, and Bill Sykes. Overall, I think that my favourite Dickens character of all time is London, if that makes sense. Dickens wrote about place and atmosphere so well, with such sprawling description. I especially loved his depiction of the marshes at Satis House; his language is so haunting and vigorous.
Q: To what extent would you say a soap, such as EastEnders, is similar to Dickens?
A: I wrote 97 episodes of EastEnders, which was hard work but a lot of fun. Anybody who watches EastEnders would agree that it does not show a true depiction of London, similarly to Dickens. In terms of those engaged, and the avid fans who hang on every word with such attention to detail, the world of Dickens and the London of EastEnders are not dissimilar in their collected fanbase. Both Dickens’ world and the world of soaps seem to have this culture of expectation and delayed gratification in which the audience are teased, tantalised and satisfied, often without even the writer’s knowledge of how events are going to end.
Q: Did you feel under pressure to stay true to the plot of Dickens?
A: I wasn’t pressurised to take anything out. I knew very clearly from the start what I wanted to do. It is such a huge book with so much going on, so my process was to describe the story in one sentence and stick to that angle. So, for Oliver Twist my sentence was: “The orphan child comes home.” For a writer, this sentence is a light which guides you. My shining sentence for Great Expectations was: “A boy who sells his soul and binds it back by becoming a man.” In such a large book, you can easily become distracted by hoards of this, that and the other.
Q: You obviously have a clear idea in your imagination how the end product will appear. How different was the reality for you on screen?
A: I was always very decided on place and clear on how Satis House would appear. We were fortunate enough to have on our team the set designer David Roger, who is a gilded genius. Satis House was astonishing. There were so many minute details that even the camera couldn’t possibly pick up. The final set made my skin prickle. Every single dead fly had been put there with a pair of tweezers. It really was like a ghost house- and absolutely horrific to imagine Estella, this little girl, living there on her own with Miss Havisham, required to bear witness every day to the havoc of what love has done to her. Whenever anyone says to me, this is a comic novel, I simply can’t understand them. I just don’t see the comedy. It is a savage, cruel and brutal book, with a beating heart of grief and loss.