冒险故事 Adventure Story

Rattigan’s own dramatic study of Alexander the Great. Starring Sean Connery, Margaretta Scott. Directed by Karel Reisz. Originally broadcast June 12, 1961. Approx. 110 minutes.

A true curio has been thrown up by the recent BBC release of the The Terence Rattigan Collection DVD box-set (see here for an introduction). The earliest production to be included, the 1961 staging of Adventure Story was in fact the second television presentation of Rattigan’s historical drama about Alexander the Great. The BBC produced it first in 1950 (no recording was made; details are here at Memorable TV), the year after it had failed in the West End. Quite why it was accorded two productions in just over a decade is a mystery – especially since this oddball 1961 production reveals all of the weaknesses of the text.

Michael Darlow’s online biography of the playwright notes that critics of the stage premiere, which gave Paul Schofield has first starring role, felt that Rattigan’s ‘naturalistic dialogue was not up to the demands of epic drama’. Certainly the first half and more of the drama plays like a slightly ludicrous historical pageant, and only towards the end does it begin to explore something more ambitious and ambivalent, as Alexander faces up to the reasons (seeking his dead father’s approval and his mother’s love) why he has been driven to conquer the known world.

Sean Connery is most definitely the reason to watch it now, shifting from boyish charm in the first scene (there is a framing prologue of Alexander on his death-bed, above) to debauched (the odd glass of wine, vaguely homoerotic embaces with his companions) and tormented anguish towards the end.