Night & Day Magazine – June 1999

Every so often there comes a moment – and a Sunday evening in early summer might well be such a moment – when what one really feels like is an hour or so of sheer, unadulterated, high-class entertainment. A drama, plenty of plot, but preferably without the overtones of undone homework that can hang so ominously over the adaptations of great classics.

All For Love, tonight on BBC1, is just such a weightless drama. Adapted from an unfinished novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, it is set in the Napoleonic wars and thus involves bosomy girls in pretty frocks, and flashing-eyed soldiers in even prettier uniforms getting into the sort of improbable scrapes only a war between two fond old enemies such as France and England can provide.

Stevenson’s wildly romantic plot is centered on a pair of national stereotypes outrageous enough to make right-thinking sorts suck their teeth with horror. There is Jacques St Ives (played by Jean-Marc Barr), a French aristocrat who, in theory, is fighting with Napoleon’s forces, but in practice finds all his time taken up with duels and mistresses. A dazzlingly funny early scene has him trying to arrange an assignation with his mistress, only to be thwarted by an unending procession of insulted military, all demanding he fight them without delay in the Bois de Boulogne. Finally, despairing of ever getting a moment alone with his girl, he resigns his commission (only officers were allowed to fight duels) with the aid of a couple of lobsters. ‘Take him away,’ roars his furious colonel, ‘And find him a particularly itchy private’s uniform!’

Holding the fort – literally – on the other side of the channel is St Ives’s British counterpart, Major Ffarquar Bolingbroke Chevening. He is played by Richard E. Grant with a combination of public-school foppishness and social unease so perfectly judged that just to look at him standing alone in a room can make you laugh out loud.

Poised between the Froggy and the Rosbif are the two Misses Gilchrist – Flora, an insipid ingénue part in which Anna Friel does her best, and her sexy aunt Catherine, in which Miranda Richardson has a good deal more fun. By means of a series of gaily incredible devices, the parties collide and, after quantities of gallant swordfighting and galloping thoroughbreds, they all live happily ever after.

Whatever the final state of Stevenson’s unfinished manuscript, it is impossible to imagine he could have been anything other than charmed by its transformation for television. This is a perfect summer night’s fantasy – as sweet-nature, elegant, silly and funny as the young officers who are its heroes, and with the same well-concealed edge of darkness.

The script, by Allan Cubitt, is fast, inventive and crackles like musket-fire with jokes. Background music is deployed with imagination and wit (the hussars go off to battle to the sound of Offenbach’s ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’), and Harry Hook’s direction is impeccable.