![]() Her performance is always fully engaged, at one with the story, which is itself a small gem. When Miss Poe comes in out of breath, you could swear Wille was running up stairs while delivering her lines. Wille made me laugh aloud at the pompous trumpeting of the late Reverend Jenkins. They also have moments of quiet tragedy (a lost brother, a suitor rejected to please the family but never forgotten) and of high drama. Benson’s Mapp v. Lucia novels, Gaskell’s ladies of Cranford have their jealousies and their vanities. Miss Jenkins could not refrain from talking at Captain Brown, and though he did not reply, he drummed with his fingers, which action she felt and resented as very disparaging to Dr Johnson.’ Oh, if only life were still as simple.Ĭlare Wille’s performance of this gently satirical look at a genteel English village in the first half of the nineteenth century may be the wittiest I’ve ever heard. ‘It was the only difference of opinion they had ever had, but that difference was enough. You can hear her smiling at its preoccupations with thrift, etiquette, class, crochet, ribbons, gossip and the growing coolness between Miss Jenkins, doyenne of the tea table, and Captain Brown, who finds Boz more entertaining than Samuel Johnson. Her cool, clear gaze misses nothing in this mid-Victorian provincial backwater. This is the fourth Cranford I’ve heard – Prunella Scales did the last – and for once, in Clare Wille, they’ve got the right-aged reader. What makes her best-known book, a quintessentially English take on the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, so beguiling is the gently ironic tone of the young narrator, Mary Smith. Cranford wasn’t inhabited exclusively by daft old biddies wearing bonnets, shawls and frozen expressions of scandalised incredulity Mrs Gaskell wrote about real people – some, admittedly, with eccentric ways, but nonetheless genuine. Put a theatrical dame into a bonnet and willy-nilly, no matter how many Baftas she’s bagged, she becomes a pantomime dame. The BBC 1 costume-drama version shouldn’t put Wille’s telling of the original in the shade.ĭone that, been there, seen the TV serial, got the T-shirt (Miss Matty is the lick), but have you read the book? The problem with screen adaptations of period pieces is that they inevitably fall into the same trap. The plotlines – a mésalliance between a titled lady and one of the town’s few virile men, a financial scandal, a beturbanned magician, a prodigal’s return – were probably pretty sensational when the novel was first published, but are most important as the frame on which Gaskell constructs a beguiling picture of a dying society. Yet neither Mary’s narrow field of focus nor the delicacy of her humour preclude sharp observations about the frailties of human nature or warnings of the disruption that events in the wider world are about to visit on her unsuspecting friends. Clare Wille is delightfully warm and compassionate as the young narrator Mary Smith, fondly recounting the “elegant economies” of her Cranford circle of spinsters and widows. So the desperate gentlewomen keep busy sublimating more basic urges into a passion for Victorian social niceties. The women are in charge, because the men mostly have business elsewhere. Welcome to the quiet backwater of Cranford. Titles by Elizabeth Gaskell Titles by Elizabeth Gaskell Cousin Phillis (unabridged) Cranford (unabridged) North and South (abridged) North and South (unabridged) Wives and Daughters (abridged) Wives and Daughters (unabridged) Reviews Titles read by Clare Wille Titles read by Clare Wille Cranford (unabridged) The Grand Sophy (abridged) A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (unabridged) Music & Silence (abridged) North and South (abridged) North and South (unabridged) Oroonoko (unabridged) The Pleasures of the Garden (selections) For Naxos AudioBooks she has recorded Cranford, North and South and Oroonoko. She also performed in the radio sketch shows Spats and Watercooler. On radio, Clare joined Stephen Mangan in the comedy Elvenquest for Radio 4. She was Camilla, Prince Charles’s private secretary, in the hit BBC satire W1A. Her work in comedy includes Lovesick on Netflix, Channel 4’s Gameface, Channel 5’s sketch show Swinging and the BBC’s rolling news spoof Broken News. ![]() Other drama credits include Housewife 49, Coronation Street, Silent Witness, Vera and Victoria. She was series regular DS Dawson in ITV’s 60s police drama Heartbeat. Clare Wille was born in Manchester, studied English Literature at Bristol University and trained at RADA. ![]()
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