PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE.(The Forsyte Saga)

As Irene Forsyte, in the new, eight-part Masterpiece Theatre version of "The Forsyte Saga" (based on the first two books of the trilogy by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Galsworthy), Gina McKee calls the term "Galsworthian pale" to mind. It's an invented phrase, but apt, when it comes to describing both the coolness of McKee's temperament and the white, white skin that she wears like an alabaster shield--to protect her against the brutal physical and psychological demands of her husband, Soames Forsyte (Damian Lewis). McKee, who played Hugh Grant's wheelchair-bound ex-girlfriend in the 1999 film "Notting Hill," and a waitress in search of love in the same year's "Wonderland," must have exercised an extraordinary amount of discipline to flatten and mute her colorful modern edge; here she delivers a masterly performance as a woman trapped in the upper-class fiction of Victorian respectability, dying for the truth. She is just what Galsworthy (whom Virginia Woolf once called a "stuffed shirt") must have been getting at when he first envisioned Irene. In his cooked-up prose, he writes, "The gods had given Irene dark brown eyes and golden hair, that strange combination, provocative of men's glances." He goes on, "The full, soft pallor of her neck and shoulders, above a gold-colored frock, gave to her personality an alluring strangeness." In McKee, that "strangeness" comes out in her rare, slow, and deliberate enunciation; her internal life, her search for love outside her empty marriage, keeps her mostly silent as she watches desperately for an escape route. You sense that if she were to open her mouth she'd start to scream and never stop.

When we are first introduced to Irene in "The Forsyte Saga"--the first installment aired on PBS on October 6th--she is living with her stepmother, Mrs. Heron (Joanna David), in Bournemouth. Irene is a middle-class provincial girl with few prospects for a successful marriage (she does not have an impressive dowry). She has been trained, as many young women at the time were, to be "at home." Her natural intelligence, sensitivity, and wit all go into her efforts to perfect her skills as a pianist. The rest she blocks out: her grief over her father's death, her stepmother's dreary clucking about cash and position, and, eventually, the unwelcome attentions of a young London solicitor, Soames Forsyte. Stiff-necked, stiff-lipped, and with stiff red hair, Soames is the beloved child of the Forsyte family and the heir apparent not only to its fortune but also to its long-standing imperialist ideals--maintain order at all costs, bear your burdens lightly, and keep the class distinctions clear. His cousin Young Jolyon (the sweet-faced Rupert Graves), who is first in line to the Forsyte throne, has been virtually disinherited, having left his wife and his daughter, June, for June's governess, Helene (Amanda Ooms). Soames's sister, Winifred (Amanda Root), has married a bounder and a cad named Montague Dartie (the suitably creepy Ben Miles). In the huge extended family, then, Soames is the only truly "correct" Forsyte.

The melodrama of Galsworthy's trilogy filled twenty-six episodes in the first adaptation of "The Forsyte Saga," which aired in the United States in 1969, and was, at the time, the most ambitious series of its kind. Its power, as I recall, lay in its ability to persuade American viewers to give in to their closet Anglophilia. Since then, however, Americans have picked up another white man's burden--Tony Soprano's--and the flushed cheeks, the rustlings of silk, the tinkling of servants' bells that adorned the decline of an Empire would make precious little sense now if the producer of the new series, Sita Williams, had not incorporated some critical distance into the enterprise. Without sacrificing narrative--or the superficial thrill to be got out of simply examining the gleaming objects on Irene Forsyte's dressing table--the "Saga" has been adapted to our times, by Jan McVerry and Stephen Mallatratt, who ...