Awfully Big Adventure, An

It is difficult to understand why anyone would think that Beryl Bainbridge’s ironically chirpy novel, An Awfully Big Adventure, was material for a film. With its episodic, oblique narrative and welter of ill-defined minor characters it is not an easy book to read and one would have hoped that a screen adaptation might have corrected this. If anything, the reverse seems to have happened and Charles Wood’s screenplay is even more fragmented although to be fair, as, for example, most of one scene involving Stella being interviewed by a reporter from a local newspaper seems to have been left on the cutting-room floor, it is probably not entirely his fault.

The film offers up the coming-of-age story of Stella (Georgina Cates) who in immediate post-war LIverpool has been indentured by her kindly Uncle Vernon (Edward Petherbridge) to a small theatrical company run by Meredith Potter (Hugh Grant). One might think this is the last place to which anyone responsible would send a young girl and,, sure enough before long the wide-eyed but pragmatic Stella is being sexually accosted by various men and, eventually, deflowered by a former ex-matinee idol P. L. O'Hara (Alan Rickman).

The film has that kind of overly-tidy look of television productions and Newell never manages to bring a sense of authenticity to what remains a collection of disjointed incidents. Newcomer Cates has her moments but neither Grant nor Rickman are particularly effective in their roles and the rest of the cast has little to do.  There is at the heart of An Awfully Big Adventure an affecting tragedy and this is acknowledged in its final scenes but it doesn’t make what has gone before any better.

 

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