Mary Barton : bientôt une adaptation pour la BBC

Après Wives & Daughters, North & South et Cranford, c'est au tour de Mary Barton, le premier roman d'Elizabeth Gaskell d'être adapté par la BBC. Je n'ai pas encore lu ce roman mais je me réjouis de cette nouvelle, surtout que c'est la formidable Heidi Thomas (I capture the castle, Cranford, Call the midwife) qui a travaillé sur le scénario !

Je vous poste l'article du Guardian :

Citation :

Television is turning its attention to the industrial working class as an antidote to recent period drama focusing on upper-class glamour. The BBC is looking to adapt Elizabeth Gaskell's Victorian novel Mary Barton, the story of a young woman trapped in the appalling housing conditions and social inequality of 19th-century Manchester.



Heidi Thomas, the creator and writer of the BBC1 hit Call the Midwife, is working on the draft script of the first episode for BBC Wales. Call the Midwife has been the biggest BBC drama hit for a decade, and this is encouraging a move towards bolder social realism.

Thomas said: "I think it is important the working classes have their story told and history brought to life. I am keen to see that on screen. The novel is all about the rights of workers, how they organise, the start of trade unions, the life experiences of the very poor. It will shine a light on where we came from, compared to how we live now. It is important not just to make period dramas which are visually appealing.

"This is close to my heart. I do like a muscular, Victorian novel, something heavyweight. My own family background consists of agricultural labourers from rural Wales and Suffolk, who moved to Liverpool in the 1840s, and lived in the Garston [dock] area."

Mary Barton was the first novel by Gaskell, wife of the Rev William Gaskell, a prominent Manchester Unitarian minister and charity worker, who used her writing as a critique of society and to promote social reform.

Published in 1848, with the subtitle A Tale of Manchester Life, it was set in 1839-42, when Friedrich Engels was researching his seminal book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. The Gaskells lived in an elegant, stucco villa, but Engels described one of the slums close to their house. Mary Barton is the beautiful daughter of John Barton, a mill worker who questions the extreme inequalities in wealth around him and joins the Chartist movement. Mary attracts the attention of two men, Jem, from her background, and Harry Carson, the son of a rich mill owner, who offers escape but is murdered, making Jem a suspect.

Mary Barton is not the first of Gaskell's novels to be adapted for television. In 2004 the BBC turned North and South, the story of middle-class Margaret Hale, who is forced to settle in a Northern industrial town, into a mini-series. And Thomas adapted Cranford for the BBC in 2007, from Gaskell's gentler, observational novels about life in a small English town. Thomas depicted life in a small terraced street of Liverpool in 1920 for a BBC period drama, Lilies, also screened in 2007, based on the tales of her Liverpudlian grandmother.

She has written a tear-jerking Call the Midwife Christmas Day special, which will run at 7.45pm to avoid a clash with Downton Abbey at 9pm. Within minutes, it shows a woman giving birth on the seat of the only lavatory in her tenement. It progresses to a story about an elderly tramp, Mrs Jenkins, who wanders around, half-starved, in lice-ridden rags and boots gummed to her feet. When she is spotted hovering around the babies in prams at the clinic, she is driven away.

It transpires that she is drawn to babies because her five children all perished in the workhouse when she became a widow in 1912. Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine), the young midwife, researches her story, and takes her to the unmarked paupers' grave. She is later shown helping to make costumes for the nativity play organised by Chummie (Miranda Hart).

Philippa Lowthorpe, the director, said: "It is just a tragedy, but in the spirit of Call the Midwife they do find a resolution to her sorrow. Our audience do invest a lot in the show." Another grim theme of the episode shows a young pregnant teenager giving birth on her own in a deserted basement, and then leaving the baby on the steps of the convent, where he is rescued and eventually reunited with the mother and her parents.

In a related development, after the Secret History of Our Streets became a surprise hit for BBC2 this year, BBC1 controller Danny Cohen, unveiling his future programme for 2013 last week, said that Paul O'Grady was making a series about the history of the working classes. "It is something he feels passionately about," Cohen said.

Que pensez-vous de ce nouveau projet ?

Je suis assez enthousiaste même si je n'ai pas lu le roman!

idem pour moi, mais je pense essayer de lire le roman avant de voir le film. j'ai hâte de commencer une autre des oeuvres de cet auteur.

Je crois qu'il n'a pas encore été traduit en français par contre

Emjy : traduction récente non mais si tu as une liseuse, le site gallica est ton ami. il existe une ancienne version traduite idem pour d'autres oeuvres de Gaskell

@Emjy: non en effet, mais je crois qu'une traduction est en préparation... Mais je ne sais pas chez quel éditeur...

Ca me donne très envie de lire le livre avant !!

Miss Virginia a écrit:

Je suis assez enthousiaste même si je n'ai pas lu le roman!

Idem!

J'ai l'impression qu'il n'y a rien de nouveau depuis l'annonce de Décembre dernier. Savez-vous si le projet est poursuivi ou s'il a été abandonné ?

Effectivement, il n'y a pas de nouvelles de ce projet depuis des mois ... Mais c'est peut-être parce qu'au moment où l'article a été publié, Heidi Thomas venait de commencer de travailler sur le scénario

Croisons les doigts !