This production never really got off the ground for me. The plot is so cut up as to be disjointed and the production is so short that unless you've read the novel or seen a better adaptation (like the 1995 one with Amanda Root) you're going to be a bit lost since there's no time for character development.

I liked Sally Hawkins as Anne, but the rest of the cast fell rather short of what they should have been. Mrs. Croft was far too old, as was Anne's elder sister Elizabeth. Mary uttered everything in such throbbing accents that the general peevishness and selfishness of her character was lost. Much better was Sophie Thompson's Mary, whose selfishness and sense of ill-usage is so well established that by the time Wentworth suggests Anne stay with the injured Louisa and Mary objects that she, as Louisa's sister in law, should stay instead, you can't imagine anyone less suited to do so. In this version, she might as well stay as she is insufficiently differentiated from anyone else in the production.

Rupert Penry-Jones is nice to look at, but he made a much better St. John Rivers (1995 Jane Eyre), probably because that character required less implied depth of feeling. I agree with the comments made earlier about the gig scene: seemed more like he was trying to get rid of Anne than do her a favor. Likewise the accident scene: it happens so fast and with so little context, you wonder what all the fuss is about. And moving the speech that Wentworth overhears in the novel to the beginning of this production is a critical misstep that only contributes to the disjointed nature of the script.

My other problem with this version was the lighting. Sometimes everything looked like a scene from the CSI morgue -- very very blue. Other times the lighting was so bad it was hard to make out the scene very well, like when Anne visits her old school friend, Mrs. Smith (who, by the way, is supposed to be more or less paralyzed. Having her run up to Anne on the street to tell her of Mr. Elliot's awful character was such a violation that for a minute I couldn't think who she was -- I thought she was one of the Musgrove girls. And she might as well have been. All the girls were pretty much interchangeable). And the running scene at the end...in an era where propriety was at a premium, it's hard to imagine gentle Anne tearing all over Bath like some demented hoyden. How silly can you get? It's too bad. Sally Hawkins had all the makings of a good Anne Elliot, but she was completely hamstrung by a poorly organized script and an over-truncated production.

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