When it comes to Dickens adaptations, it helps to temper your expectations. The revered Victorian writer is perhaps the most frequently adapted novelist in history – but to what end? The results are wildly inconsistent: for every The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) or Bleak House (2005), there are a dozen insipid Christmas Carols, or a handful of regrettable Oliver Twists. The BBC are once more throwing their (old-fashioned bowler) hat into the ring with a new six-episode screen version of Great Expectations. But how many more hats can this particular ring withstand?
Starring Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead as Pip, Shalom Brune-Franklin (Line of Duty) as Estella, and Oliva Colman as Miss Havisham, the new BBC series is a retelling of Dickens’s rags-to-riches bildungsroman – roughed up a bit with some distinctly modern sex and violence. Peaky Blinders scribe Steven Knight wrote the adaptation, the latest in a long line of Great Expectations adaptations for the screen. The BBC itself had tackled the material as recently as 2011, with a miniseries starring Gillian Anderson. For many people, David Lean’s 1946 adaptation remains the gold standard of Great Expectations on screen, and the numerous subsequent efforts can be seen as quixotic attempts to rebottle this lightning. As Nick Hilton argues in his two-star review of the new series: “This adaptation of the great novel is needless and lazy […] even with the infusion of sex and violence and post-colonial theory, it is hard to feel excited about this new take.”
