The same old story

Hard on the heels of last year’s television adaptation starring David Suchet and Ray Winstone is a new version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, in cinemas later this month. The new version, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, and which closed the 2012 London Film Festival, comes after adaptations which include David Lean’s 1946 classic, the BBC’s 1999 version with Charlotte Rampling, a 1981 take on the yarn, an early 1970s production starring Michael York, one in 2007 with Timothy Spall, another featuring Ray McAnally, and yet another with Gwyneth Paltrow.

At least the versions differ — for example, Paltrow’s dumbed-down offering is set in modern times complete with an MTV-style soundtrack, while this latest adaptation differs from numerous others by being especially faithful to the book. Many locations are close to those in the novel, and the director made sure that the ages of the actors were similar to those of the characters.

In 2009, the costume-drama scriptwriting supremo Andrew Davies lambasted the BBC for sticking to the same old literary crowd-pleasers, after jettisoning his takes on Dickens’s lesser-known Dombey and Son and Trollope’s Palliser novels because they wanted yet another version of David Copperfield. There are far more versions of David Copperfield knocking about than we could ever need, including versions starring everyone from Arthur Lowe to W.C. Fields, Maggie Smith to Eileen Atkins, and Simon Callow to Richard Attenborough.

However, David Copperfield seems to have been rather neglected when compared with that other overfamiliar Dickens narrative, Oliver Twist. That has been filmed for cinema in 1922, 1933, 1948 by David Lean, 1968 (the musical) and by Roman Polanski in 2005. Television versions include ones from 1983, 1991, 1999 (starring Robert Lindsay), 2005 (Disney) and 2007 (with Timothy Spall). And don’t get me started on A Christmas Carol.