Birdsong: ‘It’s a story about love, passion, life and death’

COLD winter evenings call for epic TV romances, and this month along comes a very special one in Birdsong. Based on the modern classic by Sebastian Faulks, BBC1’s two-parter spans the decade of the First World War, telling the story of Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman who arrives in Amiens, Northern France, in 1910 to stay with the Azaire family. He falls in love with Isabelle Azaire, wife of his bullish host, and they embark on an illicit affair before he’s summoned to go to war.

The task of bringing Faulks’s moving novel to the small screen fell to Bafta award-winning screenwriter Abi Morgan, whose recent accomplishments include The Hour and The Iron Lady. “It’s such an exquisite book it was terrifying,” she says.

In attempting to intertwine the love story with the horrors of the Somme, Morgan tried to distil the thematic and emotional core of the book.

“Part of my job is to literally pull back and pull back, so the dialogue is very spare,” says Morgan. “You’re constantly trying to reflect the contradiction of the violence and love affair, these two very different places and emotions.”

Morgan’s approach was to read the book, then jot down everything she remembered about it. “That’s how I started, because when you’re writing it’s just as important what you leave out as what you put in,” she says.

Eddie Redmayne plays the complex loner Stephen and shares Morgan’s hope that they do justice to the book. “I also hope we manage to create the complexity of characters who are real and that we somehow get an insight into quite how extraordinarily complicated this war was,” he says.

French actress Clemence Poesy, who plays Isabelle, says she hadn’t read Birdsong before meeting director Phillip Martin, but she soon fell in love with the story. “Birdsong isn’t as big in France as it is in England, but when I spoke to my English friends about the book, I found that they were completely obsessed by it,” says the 29-year-old.

“It’s a brilliant story about love, passion, life at its peak and then death. I think it explores such extremes and describes them beautifully and so truthfully. The characters are very modern and you don’t really realise that you’re in a period drama. That’s what we tried to get across when filming.”

Much of the shoot took place in Budapest, where the production designer constructed intricate warren-like trenches from scratch.

“The landscape was very similar to what it would have been like, and the other thing that made it come to life was the baking summer heat in Budapest,” says Redmayne. “You’re in these huge, really warm woollen clothes and that’s exactly what [the soldiers] had to deal with. I couldn’t get over the fact that on the day we filmed ‘going over the top’, I had to wear a tie and a pin, whilst also being equipped with a revolver, but that’s what an officer would have worn.”

Redmayne researched the journey Stephen takes through the tunnels under the Somme. “I was lucky enough to visit France with Joseph Mawle, who plays tunneller Jack Firebrace,” he says. “We went down these tunnels which had just been rediscovered and crawled around on our hands and knees amongst chalk rubble. It was just the most extraordinary thing. I was shocked at how close the German and British frontlines were.”

In one tunnel, they even discovered a poem written in pencil on the chalk wall. “It must have been almost 100 years since it was last read,” says Redmayne.

The poem read: If in this place you are detained, don’t look around you all in vain, but cast your net and you shall find that every cloud is silver lined … Still.

“It was extraordinary and incredibly moving to read, especially knowing that although Sebastian’s piece is fictional, it is based on truth,” Redmayne says.

As for the romance, there are no rambling professions of love – Stephen and Isabelle’s courtship is one of lingering glances. Redmayne believes this stems from Stephen not being a great communicator. “He’s an isolated human being and someone who chooses his words carefully. But there’s also something magnetic between these two people – maybe love, maybe eroticism. It’s also that other thing that no-one can articulate; it’s something chemical.”

Poesy feels Isabelle is equally isolated when the characters first meet. “Like Stephen, it’s probably the first time Isabelle has had any connection with anyone as her life with her husband is quite miserable,” she says.

As fans of the book know, the all-consuming affair has life-changing consequences for both and the contrast between the Stephen we see in France and the Stephen we see on the frontline is brought to life in the TV adaptation.

“The people we meet in life and the loves of our life are very, very important in terms of what or who we become,” says Poesy. “I think Stephen changes in a different way from Isabelle. He is a beautiful character because he is moved by love and by life and he is changed deeply by his experience in the trenches.”

As with all ill-fated romances, perhaps viewers shouldn’t expect a “happy ever after”, but the cast aren’t going to give anything away.

Instead Poesy says: “What I’ve loved about making films is that you can talk about the mystery we all are to one another. For me, the story was very much about how you can feel like you know someone and discover that actually you don’t know them at all.”

• Birdsong begins on BBC1 on Sunday