Tanika Gupta’s Great Expectations, set in 19th-century India during the British Raj, sounded as if it might be a magnificently arranged marriage, a mix of narrative energies, a cultural hybrid of Dickens’s masterpiece. But the challenge for anyone undertaking an adaptation of this sort is that once you have to make do without the flesh of Dickens’s language, his vim and strangeness, the bones of the surviving narrative tend to creak (all that sentimentality and improbable plot-twisting get unforgivingly exposed).
Gupta’s respectful but slack script involves too much telling: “The English are our puppet masters and if we want a good life, we have to dance to their tune.” And: “The English have kept us down for so long, we don’t believe in ourselves any more.” And: “The white devil treats the black man worse than the brown.” These are repeated truths that need unpacking through action, not in potted lines.
