Easy to underestimate John Galsworthy, winner of the 1932 Nobel prize in literature, whose once fashionable plays are now rarely seen but whose most famous sequence of novels has often been dramatised. I went into The Forsyte Saga anticipating fabric and furrowed brows. Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan’s splendid new version is much more disruptive.
Centrally there is The Rape. That is the event everyone remembers from whichever televised version (1967 or 2002) they saw. It is the moment when Soames Forsyte – the “man of property”, rigid with respectability – lays claim to what he regards as a covetable possession: his wife, Irene, who moves through the saga like Helen of Troy. In the language of the period, “he forced her”. A man who seemed merely chilly becomes hateful; the acquisitiveness natural to a family defined by “money and secrets” is proved to be lethal; conventional society is exposed. Yet in a twist that gives the novel another vein of feeling, Soames is eventually shown to have a heart.
