Definitive Edwardian Drama....

...in some ways. So perfectly evokes a time and place (that's my big thing - that's what I look for in a production). Flambards has always been a haunting memory for me - the musical score helped in that.

I finally bought Flambards and have been watching it once again after all these years and for me it holds up very well. Very soothing - and really brings to reality the shifting of the age at the beginning of the century. I have an enormous fondness for evocative period pieces that really and truly evoke a time and place - and I think Flambards does that exquisitely. Especially the shift in the lives of young women.

The lovely countryside filmed in the autumn and spring and the gritty un-prettified dirt of the buildings and gates and everyday rooms and things are all perfect to my mind, and the smallness of everything, too, the very human scale of even the "grand" dwellings. Pitch-perfect. I can smell the hay in the barn with the planes. I feel that that was really how it looked and felt in those great old country houses in that era. The look of that kitchen takes me back to my childhood in New England in old Colonial houses. I think its a brilliant production and I understand the use of the music - though it seems familiar more than just being associated with Flambards. Not sure why - the use of the pan flute maybe.

I am also noticing that all the props seem to be actual period pieces, authentic antiques. The tools Christina hands William in the barn during the all-night work session - they are authentic. The hotel register Christina carries when she is meeting Mark at the Hotel Front Desk has frayed edges and looks authentic. I am delighting in the authenticity - and wonder if a new rendering would succeed in this level of detail and atmosphere. I am doubting it.