Andrew Davies sexes up Sanditon in 'risqué' new Jane Austen adaptation
How do you top a Jane Austen adaptation that featured Colin Firth in a wet shirt? The answer, for screenwriter Andrew Davies, is to dispense with the shirt entirely.
The man renowned for sexing up the staid world of period drama, beginning with that famous version of Pride and Prejudice nearly 25 years ago, is bringing a new Austen adaptation to the screen.
He has created Sanditon, based on the author’s unfinished last novel, and filled it with naked men, a hero who emerges from the waves in the style of Daniel Craig’s 007, and a sex act in the woods.
At a preview screening of the ITV drama, Davies happily admitted to spicing up Austen’s text.
“I write something that I would like to watch and I suppose the ‘sexing it up’ thing comes in fairly naturally. Because if it’s not there I feel, well, that’s a shame - let’s put some in,” he said.
Sanditon stars Rose Williams as Charlotte Heywood and takes its name from a sleepy fishing village which entrepreneur Tom Parker (Kris Marshall) plans to turn into a fashionable Regency resort.
Charlotte goes to stay and encounters a cast of characters including Theo James as Tom’s brooding but handsome brother, Sidney, and the villainous Edward Denham (Jack Fox).
In Austen’s original text, Charlotte spies Denham and a female character who appeared "closely engaged in gentle conversation”. Davies has turned that into a sex scene which will have purists reaching for the smelling salts.
Fox said the “risque” scene is a reminder that sex was just as prevalent in the 19th century as it is now, yet we wrongly imagine that people of the time were “too good and too proper to indulge in such things.”
“Obviously people got up to all sorts of mischief,” he said.
The nude bathing scenes follows shirtless appearances by Aidan Turner in Poldark and by Tom Bateman in Beecham House.
One audience member at the screening said she was “beginning to feel sorry for male actors” because they are so regularly required to strip off on screen these days. But for Williams, having a conversation about the objectification of men is a welcome change.
“For so long, it’s been the norm for women to expose their bodies and that’s something we’re culturally used to. So for there to be a conversation now… the shift is needed. It’s interesting that the focus is on males stripping when women have been for so long,” she said.
Davies said the nudity was historically accurate - in those times it was customary for men to bathe naked in the sea while women were wheeled to the shoreline in bathing machines and wore outfits that covered them from head to toe.
But he added: “There’s more male nudity these days and pulling back on female nudity. Female nudity can be a contentious area so one feels comfortable not [including it]. But maybe the pendulum might swing back.”
Austen wrote 11 chapters of Sanditon before her death in 1817, which only took Davies so far. “I used up the material in the first half of the first episode,” he admitted. The eight-part drama will be broadcast later this summer and Davies hopes to bring it back for a second series.
Anne Reid, the veteran actress who plays the grand Lady Denham, said she found it hard to get used to the screen nudity. "I'm very old-fashioned. Nobody did it in my day, in movies and things - people didn’t take their clothes off very much. Now they’re doing it at all the time.
“I don’t have any strong feelings about it either way, It’s just when I was young, people didn’t do half the things they do now."
