Monomania radar: Dorothea strikes again

Picture source: www.s3books.com

Since my last post, I have been given extra motivation to finish Middlemarch within a reasonable time frame: I have found out through the IMDB boards and via this post that Sam Mendes is set to direct the first big screen adaptation of George Eliot's classic, coming to a screen near us sometime in 2009.

Andrew Davies is is currently working on the screenplay. Quelle surprise! Does this man ever take a break? (This informative post from Screen Stories seems to indicate he doesn't) So he's been drafted because of the stripes he earned with his previous Middlemarch version (the BBC 1994 mini) but I confess I would have loved to see Dorothea through a fresh pair of eyes, preferably those of Sandy Welch (big favorite of mine) or Emma Thompson (who wrote that acclaimed script for Sense and Sensibility in 1995). Plus I do think Davies's 1994 screenplay lacked the spark I normally associate with his work.

Still, I live in hope that Mendes's movie could be really good. It seems Davies will focus on the central couples in the novel which I think is the right approach: on the big screen one simply does not have time to develop all of the peripheral characters crafted by George Eliot. But Davies also needs to find the spark, the wow factor... He's done it before with Pride and Prejudice (and many other classics), so he can do it again. On my part I must hurry up and finish this mammoth book before then - I am not exactly a fast reader!

See also:

This article in the Guardian