Too many long, lingering looks and soft focus, presumably as a feeble attempt to create atmosphere, and too much of the plot that was missing in action.
Now to the leads. Eddie Redmayne is clearly flavour of the month right now, but I thought his performance was bizarre. Whenever you see Shakespeare performed, the acting can be as good as you like, the direction as innovative as a you can imagine, but if the text gets butchered then it's dead in the water, and that was my problem with Redmayne - I just couldn't understand the half of what he was saying. I was only being partly sarcastic when I complimented the Beeb on giving an opportunity to a lead with a speech defect. Thank goodness for Sky+ which allowed me use Live Pause to rewind - I kept having to do that. A word of advice for young Mr Redmayne: give up the ventriloquist impressions, and open your damn mouth - that way the words might come out clearly. Overall though, we saw too much of Redmayne's mouth which people have variously described as looking as though he had a slug stuck to his top lip, or in one case as being 'pale, sausage-like'.
Clemence Poesy had obviously taken her cue from Redmayne and spent the whole three hours whispering - maybe it was an attempt to convey her vulnerability, but it just made her sound deranged.
I thought Joseph Mawle as Jack Firebrace was excellent, as was Marie Josee Croze as Jeanne - she convinced where Poesy didn't. It struck me from early on that it was just the sort of drama where Anthony Andrews would be bound to appear, and right on cue he popped up as Colonel Barclay - actually his brand of fey madness worked quite well and if someone had given him a teddy bear and told me his first name was Sebastian then I wouldn't have been surprised.
I watched both parts all the way through, mainly because I couldn't believe that the level of mediocrity could be sustained for such a lengthy period, but it was. Dire, dire, dire - I'm off to re-read the book.
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