Brits Abroad.

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

From E. M. Forster's classic revisited to Tracey Ullman's take on America today, Joan Juliet Buck is dazzled by two great new shows.

Stew the Baedeker! Dismiss the cicerone! . . . This is adventure, this is Italy, this is life!" says the throbbing novelist Eleanor Lavish in the Florence pensione full of English people where Lucy Honeychurch and her cousin Charlotte Bartlett are staying. The new version of A Room with a View on PBS's Masterpiece Classic is a little wilder and heavier on the symbolism than James Ivory's 1985 movie. The Andrew Davies script moves the story from 1908 to 1912, closer to World War I, and focuses on the idea of the Life Force, a favorite of Edwardian writers.

Lucy Honeychurch is young, her emotions constantly at war with her sense of propriety. Charlotte is older, poor, and in charge of that propriety. Miss Lavish is ageless, fearless, and hokey. Within minutes, Mr. Emerson--the Life Force in person, blunt, lower class, a kind atheist full of good sense--has given Miss Honeychurch and Miss Bartlett the rooms with a view that he and his son, George, are in.

Lucy awakens to the sun on the Arno, Miss Lavish takes her into Florence along "a delightfully dirty back way," and Mr. Emerson asks Lucy to help George get out of himself a bit. "Wouldn't it be good," he asks, "to express your feelings to another linked soul?"

Lucy suggests that George take up stamp collecting. George, while handsome and sweet, has that awful accent and the shaming job of railway clerk. But Lucy is moved in ways she can express only by banging out Beethoven on the piano. As she wanders alone around Florence, a man is stabbed to death right in front of her, and George rescues her. The postcards she just bought are now covered in blood, and in George's arms she feels lust. By the time George kisses her in a corner of a foreign field, Lucy's senses have been so aroused that she does the only thing a well-brought-up Edwardian girl can do. She goes to Rome and gets engaged to a foppish, undersexed suitor of her own class, Cecil Vyse, an entirely different animal from the sincere, intrusive George. And when she and Cecil return to her family in England, who should move in next door but the Life Force, father and son.

The cast is a joy: from Sinead Cusack as the romantic Miss Lavish, who darts down the Florentine streets yelling "Buon giorno" to the locals as she tells Lucy, "You'll never regret a little civility to your inferiors," to Sophie Thompson as the tremulous Charlotte, to Timothy Spall and his son, Rafe, as Mr. Emerson and George, to Laurence Fox as Cecil Vyse--the part that Daniel Day-Lewis played in the 1985 film. Helena Bonham Carter was Lucy in that one; here, Elaine Cassidy is a serious Lucy, less of a curly gorgeousness, more of a watcher.