THE Big House is a familiar subject for TV drama, but tonight's Screen Two version of Henry Green's novel Loving, set in an Anglo-Irish country house during the second World War, is considerably more Anglo than Irish.
In Green's story, it's not just the gentry but all the house staff, from butler down to chamber-maid, who think of England as their real home. "They didn't trust the Irish," says Mark Rylance, who plays the central role of Charlie Raunce, the disreputable butler at Kinalty Castle, pointing out that the story takes place just two decades after the War of Independence.
"In the novel and in the film, there are Irish people working outside in the grounds but, I think because of their fear of the nationalist thing, a lot of the house staff were brought over from England. You have to remember that people like chambermaids have access to a lot of intimate information about their employers. Of course, you get a lot of awful things said by the English servants at that time about the Irish."
As a result, the film is far less about Anglo-Irish relationships than it is a comic exploration of the nature of Englishness at a time of great social change. With the Blitz happening across the Irish Sea, the protagonists in Loving float in a sort of limbo, unsure whether to return home or sit out the war in safety. With staff leaving all the time, the rigid hierarchy of the servants is disrupted, particularly with the death of the old butler. The appointment of Raunce to the post - despite his employers' suspicions that he's "not quite right" further hastens the inevitable chaos.
"A butler has enormous power, both sexual and financial," explains Rylance. "He controls the food, the wine cellar, the household finances. If he wants, he can invite a maid up to his room for a pleasant evening. Raunce wants all that recognition, but he can't deal with the responsibility. It's a hopeless ambition of his, because all the things that a butler should have calmness, preparedness - he utterly lacks.
"I hadn't read Henry Green before, and it's just a fantastic novel, with wonderful dialogue very sexy and very amusing. I wish they had made a sort of Brideshead Revisited three-part series to allow it to breathe a bit, let the scenes develop more.
"It's interesting that Green has not been given the same kind of respect that Evelyn Waugh received when his books were filmed. For my money, Green's got as much to give and is still undervalued.
"It would be great if this film got people to read the novel because while the film has good things in it, you just get hints of a lot of the wonderful characters or scenes in the book."
Rylance's career includes other television dramas like The Grass Arena and Love Lies Bleeding, as well as extensive work for cinema, but at the moment he is best known as director of the newly-built Globe theatre, the meticulous reconstruction of the original Elizabethan building on the South Bank of the Thames. We met before the summer, when he was looking forward to the theatre's prologue season in July, and to completing the Globe and the indoors Inigo Jones theatre for their full opening in 1997.
"The Globe remains an enigmatic beast, and there's still plenty of debate and argument, particularly about the stage," he says. "There's been a lot of scholarship this century about the text, but now there are more and more academics coming into our area, writing about how these plays might have been staged. So the two different loves of Shakespeare are meeting in the Globe, often in conflict, but it's very fruitful and they're all learning a lot. Like anything challenging, it keeps you awake at night."
HE recognises the fear that the Globe might become just another tourist trap or heritage centre. "We could probably run it commercially just as that -charging people admission to see it, like the Tower of London. For me personally, though, I'm interested in what the relationship was between these plays and the community they were targeted at. What's the intention of Shakespeare? That's what I'm after.
"The plays were aimed very specifically, behind the mask of allegory. at particular events and people at the time. It may be that the modern theatre has lost much of that. A lot of the time these days we seem to be talking about the form rather than the content. The Globe is a very equal space and, I hope, more sensual."
