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Stealing the show
Billie Piper looks a treat but in a new television version of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the house is the star. Michael Hickling reports from Newby Hall in North Yorkshire.
The wide smile of Billie Piper should do wonders for visitor numbers to Newby Hall this summer and the naked charms of Venus will also have played a part in pulling them.
In the summer of 2002, a marble statue from Roman times of the goddess of love fetched nearly 8m at auction, a world record for an antiquity. The Venus had been acquired in Italy in the 1760s by William Weddell of Newby Hall, near Ripon, and to help pay for the place's 21st-century refurbishment the statue was auctioned by Richard Compton, Weddell's descendant and the present owner.
Part of the money went into turning the Grade I-listed stables into offices. It was here last summer they were able to accommodate the makers of an ITV version of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park with Billie Piper in the starring role of Fanny Price. The convenience of the arrangement helped ensure that, unusually, the entire film was made on location. The result is a drama which puts the hall, magnificent outside and stunning within, into the shop window for the entire 90 minutes of the film.
At one highpoint in the story, the heroine, Fanny Price, follows the man she loves outside believing her long unexpressed passion is about to be reciprocated, only to have her hopes dashed. But as the couple take the foregound, the eye of the viewer is caught and held by the scene behind. Never mind the drama, just look at those sensational herbaceous borders.
It all came about through a flying visit by a researcher in February last year. "We get two or three a year, they come and take some digital shots and we never hear from them again," says Stuart Gill, the administrator at Newby. But mindful of the effect that Brideshead Revisited had on the profile of Castle Howard in 1981, they kept their fingers crossed. Further contact was made in July with a view to filming in August. This was moved to September-October because of the availability of certain actors and the production team set up shop from the middle of August in a vacant office in the stable block which was to let for a three month period. They brought quite an entourage. At the peak they had 90 people on site, dwarfing the existing staff. On one of the busiest days they had 30 extras, but the whole operation was self-contained, with their own canteen and loos. The cast stayed in Harrogate.
"Because we bent over backwards for them, 100 per cent of the film was shot here," says Stuart Gill. "Their generator truck was parked up here from the start of filming and didn't have to move until it was a wrap. We could have held them at arm's length but we were aware that the more we worked with them, the better a production it would be. The better for them, the better for us. It's positive PR.
"How valuable? It's impossible to quantify, although we did ask the question. When you think of Brideshead, that had a massive effect, although in those days of course there were only three television channels and audiences for successful programmes were bigger than today's. But I think there's more to hang this on. Because it's Jane Austen, it's a means of displaying Newby Hall in exactly the right way."
Mansfield Park was published in 1814. Newby Hall offered an exact period setting, although Jane Austen had set her fictional house in Northamptonshire and it was the product of the prodigious incomes that flowed into English pockets from slave labour on West Indian sugar plantations. The fortune that re-made Georgian Newby Hall on the other hand was connected with the South Sea Bubble of 1720, not slavery.
The six-week shoot – a daily twelve-hour regime of 7am to 7pm – finished in the second week in October and it meant Stuart Gill had to weave around it the existing business in the grounds: crafts fairs, dog shows, and weddings. The stage for the amateur theatricals which are a significant episode in the novel was built in the library area. The last of the riggers dismantling it left a minute before a bride entered for her real-life ceremony. Getting it wrong was not an option. The "facility fee" for a library wedding and dinner in the Statue Gallery at Newby is 3,500.
"It could be quite tricky because 90 per cent of the rooms here are open to the public or are being used," says Stuart Gill. "The reality is that you can plan as much as you want. But until the art director gets the actor in front of the camera, you can't be sure what's required. My two-way radio was always crackling into life and I'd rush out in the pick-up to move the wrong sort of sheep (North Country mules) out of shot."
It was not just the sheep. Also to be avoided was the wrong kind of hay stacking, vehicles creeping into distant shot and aeroplanes and farm machinery droning. Because it's such a wide and beautiful vista, these sounds travelled for miles and could disrupt hours of filming.
Precious furniture made by Chippendale from Robert Adam designs with Gobelin tapestry was pushed into other rooms as the production company brought in their own that could withstand a knock or two without everyone flinching. False walls were built to mask others that weren't period (you will do well to spot a light switch) and the red corridor going into the Victorian wing with William Morris oak carving had to be masked. Quite a lot of the novel's wedding scene is done on the lawn, with beautiful views – and no electricity pylons. Care was taken that the food on display in this scene was right for the period.
The production had its own separate costume director who obtained the material for Billie Piper's wedding dress for over 120 a yard from Italy, only to discover it was too heavy for her to dance in, and further modification was required. A new flag was made for the hall's flagpole with a crest correct for the period and a garden statue of a wood nymph in bronze by the contemporary artist David Williams-Ellis had to be replaced. It's interesting that such care was taken over accuracy – neither flag nor statue can be seen close enough by the television viewer for it to matter – bearing in mind the liberties that are taken in the script with what Jane Austen actually wrote. The central figure in the novel, Fanny Price, is dull – insipid is usually the word used to describe her – and a bit of a prig. It's a puzzle why Jane Austen wanted her as the heroine in the first place. All Fanny really does is sit tight until Edmund, the man she has fancied all her life comes round, very late, to the opinion that her moral qualities are what he should look to in his choice of bride. Austen's depiction of Fanny really seems rather perverse, suggesting as it does, that high-spiritedness in a young woman should be somehow discounted.
Some believe the story of Fanny's unlikely triumph needs to be read as an implicit criticism of racy Regency values. What seems more plausible is that it's a tale of wish-fulfilment by a woman who occupied a position like Fanny's. As a similarly dependent and socially-inferior relative, Jane Austen may have felt she too lived in a household where aesthetic sensibilities were too coarse to appreciate her finer qualities. She needed her fictional triumph. The story concerns Sir Thomas Bertram, the owner of Mansfield Park and father of two sons and two daughters of his own (Tom, Edmund, Maria and Julia). He takes on Fanny, the child of his sister-in-law, Mrs Price, the wife of a poverty-stricken naval officer, out of pity and a sense of duty.
Fanny grows up to love the second son, Edmund, whose head is turned by the far more sparkling – and believable – neighbour, Mary Crawford. She likes him, but not his financial prospect as a clergyman. When Tom, the heir to Mansfield Park, ruins his health drinking and gambling and running after women, Mary changes her mind about Edmund. It looks as if he might inherit after all. Edmund sees Mary revealed as a gold-digger and, chastened, marries the noble, self-denying Fanny. The girl who had nothing stands to gain everything.
But forget the book. In the film, Billie Piper is a completely different Fanny altogether. She runs, she jumps, she laughs a lot – a bit like Julie Andrews playing Maria in the early part of The Sound of Music. Rather than being the dullest member of Sir Thomas's household, Fanny is the one with the looks and the personality. It's a winning, very likeable performance but it hasn't got much to do with Jane Austen.
The male cast have the rather thankless task of animating a set of underwritten characters who mostly seem to pop out of a box, say something, or possibly dance, and pop back in again – but always in beautiful surroundings. The novel's conclusion, where Fanny gets together with Edmund, is a model of restraint. Not a single snog occurs. This wouldn't do for telly which has them in a clinch by the end. Maggie Wadey, the writer of the screenplay, doesn't even think it's worth having to justify this, beyond saying it is what a modern audience expects.
But then her alterations are insignificant compared with what Andrew Davies, the writer on the new television version of Northanger Abbey, has done. Davies has cheerfully inserted entire scenes not in the book. A chief theme of Northanger Abbey is the popularity at that time of the Gothic novel and its grip on popular imagination, especially youthful ones. Jane Austen deploys her formidable irony to make fun of their excesses. In this television version, we see young virgins sweating in their beds, turning the pages of Gothic tales and, as they fall asleep, lurid fantasy scenes follow – the dreams inspired by their bedtime reading – of abduction and ravishment.
But then Davies has a track record for this sort of thing. He was the sole author of the scene which people mainly recall from the BBC's last Pride and Prejudice – when the sight of Mr Darcy's torso (Colin Firth) through his wet shirt sets the pulse of Jennifer Ehle's Elizabeth Bennet racing.
ITV has commissioned a season of four of Jane Austen's novels: Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and a repeat of Emma. It's probably pointless to complain about them not remaining faithful to the text. Sensibilities alter as the times change and so do the requirements of acceptable public behaviour.
The first two of these new productions have unearthed two wonderfully fresh unknowns for their heroines who, in their innocence and charm, do seem to have been born to the moral and cultural modes of English upper class life of 200 years ago. But it's only costume acting.
When my preview DVD of Mansfield Park was switched off, the programme serendipitously showing on live television was Billie Piper sitting on the sofa with Charlotte Church on Channel 4, swapping dirty jokes with her hostess, and much innuendo-laden hilarity ensued when Billie was asked the name of her character in Mansfield Park. Not quite what Miss Austen would have anticipated in her day.
Mansfield Park will be shown on Sunday, March 18 on ITV1 at 9pm.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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