Penny Dreadful
While only a scant few of the stories printed in the penny dreadfuls may be familiar to modern readers or have lasting import, such as James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by over forty years, those serialised editions have a long and lurid history, but even in their time they were disposable sensationalism with no greater purpose than to perpetuate their own existence, cliffhanger endings driving the next sale to the masses who consumed them indiscriminately.
To take the name Penny Dreadful for a new television show certainly sets up an expectation, but from Showtime, home of Californication, Dexter, The Tudors, Homeland and Dead Like Me, it is tempered by an anticipation of a more considered and cohesive work which will be aimed at a more sophisticated audience, and certainly within a marketplace increasingly crowded with Hemlock Grove and The Vampire Diaries catering for the teen audience and American Horror Story for mature viewers, it will need a strong voice for its screams to be heard above the noise even with True Blood soon to silenced permanently.
Created by screenwriter John Logan whose notable successes Gladiator and Skyfall are framed in a somewhat less glittering surround of Bats, Tornado! and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, though blame for the failure of Star Trek: Nemesis is more usefully directed at Stuart Baird’s incomprehensible and inexcusable ignorance of all things Starfleet, the project has attracted considerable headline talent; beyond former Bond Timothy Dalton, former Bond girl Eva Green, and 30 Days of Night’s Josh Hartnett, all featured in the premiere, later episodes will also feature former Who girl Billie Piper.
Set in London in 1891, the visual tone of the show is set by opening episode Night Work directed by Juan Antonia Bayona, best known for the superb El Orfanato, highly regarded for its pervasive atmosphere of melancholy dread and for bringing the superb Belén Rueda to international notice, his major accomplishment here is to create a relatively absorbing drama despite the meagre limits of Logan’s imagination.
A brief prelude leads to a title sequence composed of staples of the genre, crucifixes, cockroaches, snakes, spiders, a montage too familiar through endless repetitions, though capped with the more daring contrast of a bone china cup filled with blood which shatters as it hits the floor, but most interesting is that the cast themselves are barely glimpsed, the implication being that the show is to be bigger than any one presence.
Moving to the Wild West show of Ethan Chandler (Hartnett), as swift with his six shooter as he is with the ladies of the capital, he is approached by the mysterious Vanessa Ives (Green) who deduces the particulars of Ethan’s life and circumstance from his clothing in the manner of another more famous inhabitant of London, the first clue that the story is to be a quilt patched together from offcuts of more respectable source material.
Explaining that she has “need for a gentleman who is comfortable with firearms and not hesitant to engage in dangerous endeavours,” Vanessa requests Ethan’s presence that evening where in the company of adventurer Sir Malcolm Murray (Dalton) they descend into an opium den which turns out to be a charnel house, the show living up to its name with bodies piled high, the blood and prosthetics copious and convincing unlike the ensuing fight scene when they are attacked by the fearsome inhabitants of the underworld, clumsy and stilted.
Next visiting an unnamed surgeon (Harry Treadway) who brings the modern element of scientific enquiry to the Victoriana then eccentric Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale), the dialogue and performances are sharp but are superficialities over an increasingly pedestrian storyline. “It would appear you have an Egyptian man of no particular age who at some point in his indeterminate lifespan decided to sharpen his teeth, cover himself in hieroglyphics and grow an exoskeleton,” the surgeon observes, with Lyle translating the tattoo as “blood curse,” the implication causing him to demur further assistance.
“Do you believe there is a Demimonde, Mr Chandler? A half world between what we know and what we fear? A place in the shadows, rarely seen but deeply felt?” Vanessa asks Ethan, hinting at deeper wonders later in the season, but while a slow burn is an acceptable appetiser, so far substance is mainly found in the backgrounds, the endemic poverty of the setting sufficient horror in itself, laundry hanging from the dirty tenements in the slums, crying children dodging Hansom cabs on their way to the grandiose environ of the Explorer’s Club where Sir Malcolm has arranged to meet the anonymous pathologist.
The nagging familiarity induced by the revelation that the missing daughter Sir Malcolm seeks is named Mina is capped in the secret laboratory of the scientist when he awakens his galvanic creation and introduces himself to it as Victor Frankenstein, the apprehension condensing as it becomes apparent that the embrace of originality is to remain alien to the purpose of Penny Dreadful.
Despite the triteness of the scene, the tenderness between Victor and his creation is surprising and may be key to whether the relationship manages to set itself apart from the innumerable previous adaptations of Shelley, though with later episodes promising an appearance of Dorian Gray the premise increasingly resembles nothing so much as Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman as envisaged by Hammer, the dead flesh of existing literary figures stitched together regardless of fit in the hopes that electric charge will make them current, but considerably more invention and momentum will be required for even the modest eight episodes of the season.
