"It’s not all about sordid rutting..."
When most people think of DH Lawrence, they probably think of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, sex and schoolboy sniggering. But as part of its Modern Love season, which explores love and sexuality in 20th-century literature, BBC Four has eschewed Lawrence’s most famous work in favour of fusing two of his earlier novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, into one adaptation. As is only to be expected with Lawrence, the result is an intense, heartfelt drama which treats sex as a serious topic for intellectual interrogation.
“Lawrence’s sexuality is humanist, it’s not degrading or exhibitionist,” says Rachael Stirling, the 33-year-old actress who stars alongside Rosamund Pike as one of the two Brangwen sisters. Nevertheless, The Rainbow was considered sufficiently scandalous on its publication in 1915 for it to be successfully tried for obscenity, with all copies seized and burnt. As a result, the second part of the saga, Women in Love, was published five years after the first, even though Lawrence had originally intended to run the two together in one novel.
As this new drama shows, the different works form a coherent whole, telling the story of two sisters in the provincial Midlands wrestling with family relationships and struggling to find fulfilment – with tragic consequences. Though Stirling admits that before this production, the only DH Lawrence she had read was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “mostly for the rude bits”, she says she was immediately attracted to her character, Ursula.
“It’s a coming of age story about discovery, a woman enjoying her own sexuality. It’s about her falling in love with a man and how she deals with it.”
Ursula is a schoolteacher and notably more gritty than her sister Gudrun (Pike), a flighty, idealistic artist. The two pursue ill-fated love affairs with a pair of friends, played by Rory Kinnear and Joseph Mawle, and discuss them with zest. “Men cannot define you,” Ursula tells Gudrun at one point in the drama; at another, she complains, “he did not feed that animal side of me.”
The most shocking aspect of Lawrence’s work in his time was arguably not the sex itself, but the fact that his female characters viewed it as so important. Lawrence once described himself as a feminist, and Stirling agrees “absolutely” that he was. “He’s stating that a woman has as much right as a man to be unashamedly a sexual creature,” she says.
The sort of scenes that sent the moral guardians of the early 20th century scuttling for the matchboxes and kindling may now barely raise an eyebrow, but Lawrence would not have cheered at modern society’s attitude towards sex, according to Stirling.
“I think he’d be revolted by the way it’s accompanied with such exhibitionism and narcissism, he’d be grossed out. I think he’d start to write positively monkish literature. I think he’d start writing about plants.”
The actress has a natural humour and feistiness which fit in well with the role of Ursula, even though she jokes that she is much more of a prude than her character. “The Miranda Harts of this world, that’s what makes me laugh, a bit of modesty,” she says, referring to the famously buttoned-up comedian.
There is not much space for modesty in Women in Love. In one of her scenes, Stirling takes a nude dip in a lake with her on-screen sister.
“It was about two girls who go for a naked swim because they want to get out of a dreadful party full of toffs,” she says. “My character feels at peace. What we were depicting was sorority, not sordid rutting.” She carried the scene off with serenity – “I didn’t go on a diet. It’s important to see naked bodies as they actually are” – but shudders at the idea of the stills being “taken out of context and put in the News of the World.”
Stirling is a little wary of publicity, perhaps as a result of the inevitable reaction to her first major TV role as a vampy lesbian opposite Keeley Hawes in the 2002 adaptation of the novel Tipping the Velvet. She’s not often spotted on the red carpet or in gossip magazines because, as she puts it, “I’m not going to turn up to the opening of an envelope.”
She draws inspiration from her mother, the supremely dignified Dame Diana Rigg, the celebrated Shakespearian actress, Avengers star and former Bond girl. Stirling has also embraced both stage and screen, winning her second Olivier nomination for her performance as Lady Chiltern in last year’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband.
She may not yet be as famous as her mother, but Stirling has already won an ardent male fanbase. One admirer wrote to her, she says, announcing: “I live in Wolverhampton, I only work in Tesco’s, but I have extremely firm buttocks.”
Television Series: Women In Love (S01E02)
Release Date: March 2011
Actress: Rosamund Pike, Rachael Stirling & Tinarie Van Wyk Loots
Video Clips Credit: Trailblazer
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Rosamund Pike & Rachael Stirling
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Tinarie Van Wyk Loots
35s/14.2mb/RS.HF/720x576
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