 |
Starz TV Tie -In
2014 |
I first read Outlander twenty-four years ago and I’ve since lost count just how many times
I’ve reread it, thirty times, possibly even more. It's my ‘go to’ book, my comfort blanket, it’s in the air
that I breathe and it is written into my bones. I can fast forward, slow mo,
freeze frame, rewind and repeat at whim and the characters in my head are very
much alive. I see them, feel the air surround them, carry their thoughts on the
wind and hold them close. I like to think they are mine.
When I first heard that Outlander
was being brought to life, I worried that my vision would be ruined by
someone else’s imagination, and that somehow the story would lose something integral
in the quest to pull in a TV audience. Of course, no matter how many times I
heard that that the script was to be sympathetic to the original, I wasn’t
going to be reassured until I could see it for myself. After all, I wanted it
to, not just, look right; it had to feel right. I needed
more than just a fleeting glimpse of the Outlander story that had lived inside my
head for twenty four years. I wanted to
live it, breathe it, feel the visceral pull of it and fall in love with it all over
again. And, despite being shared with millions around the world, I had to feel
like the story was being retold, just for me.
Listening to the opening music,
seeing the credits, noting the names of the many actors who would make or break this
story, I was filled with a sense of trepidation, as so many '
what ifs' and
variables existed.
What if, I didn’t like it, ...what if , I didn’t believe the
actors,...what if , it looked like Scotland had been turned into an eighteenth
century caricature of itself?
I didn’t want mushy music and haggis; I wanted
haunting uilleann bagpipes and fiddles. I wanted dirt and danger. I wanted
stunning scenery and tumbling rivers, peat coloured heather and fast ridden
horses. I wanted day-time, night-time, Jacobites and rebels, blood, sweat, tears
and the cries of passionate lovemaking and more than anything else, I wanted a
red haired warrior with fire in soul and love in his heart.
I think more than any other
thing, finding the right characters worried me the most. I’ve carried my own
vision of Claire, Jamie, Frank and Jack Randall in my head, and so to match my ideal,
they had to be realistic to the point where they ceased to be actors and became
the characters in my head.
Claire, so quintessentially
English with her clipped vowels, was going to be a hard match. She had to be both
wild and mindful, sassy and arrogant, impetuous and reckless and more than any
other thing she had to be a match for any eighteenth century man…. and boy,
does she meet her match.
I didn’t know if a young Irish actress would be able
to be my Claire, but within minutes of Caitriona Balfe stepping onto the screen
in the opening episode, I saw Claire. She was right there in front of me, just
as if she had stepped right out of my head. I felt her desperation and finally understood the fear
and confusion of a woman trapped in the wrong time with only a futile hope of a
return to the future. And I watched in awe as she fell in love with Jamie Fraser.
Frank and Jack Randall; are the two
opposite sides of the same coin. Smart, urbane Frank, head in an eighteenth
century history book, wrapped up in the romantic notion that his Jacobite
ancestor was someone to be revered, when in fact the reality of ‘Black’ Jack
Randall is the dark and deviant opposite of all that is good. I thought no man
would ever be able to capture the darkness in his soul but I was oh, so wrong.
Tobias Menzies, is the suave sophisticated Frank to the very soles of his 1940s
brogues and in the swish of his mackintosh and yet, it is in his portrayal of
Black Jack where he truly excels. He is both master and commander, with a soul
as deep and as boundless as the pits of hell, and he makes my blood curdle.
And then, there’s Jamie, my red
haired fighter. How on earth was any actor going to be able to conjure the
essence of this man for me? For so long I have carried a combination of faces,
snippets of voices, a look, a glance, a flash of colour, an element of
surprise. I have searched for Jamie in the narrow alleyways of Edinburgh,
sought him out in ancient Scottish castles, imagined him in the heather of the
highlands and touched the standing stones that litter my landscape in the hope
of crossing through time, but never had I properly seen his face until Sam
Heughan stepped on screen. And there he was, my kilted highland warrior, with
his heart of gold and arteries of steel, and yet, there was also an aching vulnerability,
and I could see glimpses of the boy, in the twenty three year old, who was also
an exile, a man with a price on his head, who had nothing to protect himself and his
love except an empty gun and his own two hands.
Of course, there are always going
to be the purists who wanted the Outlander production to stay exactly the same
as the original manuscript but like all adapted stories it needed to work for
television and for that changes had to be made into the story for it to make
sense to an audience who couldn’t write a thesis on the Outlander phenomenon. And,
so I won’t get into the rigmarole of nit-picking and saying that… “This didn’t
happen there and that didn’t go there and she didn’t say that and he wasn’t in
it”… ad infinitum,…. but what I will acknowledge is the gift of a story, which
is both beautifully filmed and visually stunning, sumptuously costumed and so
expertly managed that my Outlander lives and breathes, and yes, I did fall in
love with the story all over again, and believe me after twenty four years and
copious rereads that’s no mean feat.
Season one has now ended its dramatic TV run and the countdown has already begun to Season two....Dragonfly in Amber is currently in production. I can't wait.
~***~
