Little Women, episode 3 review: poignant, funny, and the single best thing on TV this Christmas
How do you adapt a classic novel for television? Follow a path of slavish faithfulness and you risk boring the socks off viewers unfamiliar with the original text’s dusty corners. Take liberties, sex it up and boil down a complex narrative to something more palatable and you will raise the ire of diehard fans.
Heidi Thomas, who has previously adapted Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, knows exactly how to capture a novel’s spirit while letting her own vision shine through. Little Women, the single best thing on television over Christmas, was a delight from start to finish – a poignant, funny version of Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel which made the four March sisters seem like both exciting new creations and old friends.
We had beautiful, maternal Meg (Willa Fitzgerald), moon-faced coquette Amy (given an audaciously unsympathetic streak by Kathryn Newton), and strong-willed Jo, played with remarkable maturity by 19-year-old Maya Hawke, daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke.
The best performance of all, though, came from Annes Elwy as tragic Beth who must recline uncomplainingly as she wastes away from scarlet fever. Elwy teased out the hidden depths of the shy March sister, giving her a dreaminess that made her untimely end all the more moving.
“You are always braver than you know,” whispered Emily Watson’s matriarch, wiping her daughter’s fevered brow as she lay on her deathbed, keeping the scene just the right side of mawkishness.
Indeed, Watson made much of Marmee, whom previous adaptations have cast in far too saintly a light. As played by Watson, she was a woman who had tried to control her rage for 40 years, left powerless by a husband who had gone off to fight in a war that never felt very far from the front door.
This being a Christmas treat, we were also allowed a couple of sprightly cameos – from Angela Lansbury as Aunt March, a peppery nonagenarian with a parrot who could smell a Papist at 20 paces; and Michael Gambon as the wealthy neighbour Mr Laurence.
Despite the odd Quality Street moment – set in the snow, or in a dappled wood – this Little Women had real grit. The default modern view is that Alcott’s novel is a feminist classic. Thomas’s adaptation made it something more, a very moving account of what we leave behind when we stop being children.
