TV Reviews : ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ Touches a Hurtful Nerve

We’ve all read novels that were difficult to get into but, once in, cast a spell that compelled us to the bloody end. That’s precisely the case with the three-part “Masterpiece Theatre” adaptation of the 1894 Irish novel, “The Real Charlotte” (beginning Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, 8 p.m. on Channels 40 and 24).

The novel--a social brew of villagers and tenants and gentry and beggars--was written by two Irish spinster cousins who signed their work Somerville and Ross to mask their identities as women (whose real names were Edith Somerville and Violet Martin). Their story, as host Alistair Cooke says, “touched a hurtful nerve in Irish country life.” And the production, shot in Ireland, captures the story’s grand passions as they creep up on you with a kind of bucolic languor.

The entitled character (Jeannane Crowley) is a plain-looking, bossy, scheming woman whose malice, unleashed late in the second installment, helps destroy her Anna Karenina-like vivacious cousin (Joanna Roth). Nobody kisses the Blarney Stone here. “It’s as if Thomas Hardy had been dropped into County Cork,” murmurs host Cooke, whose commentaries create an indispensable context and should be required listening (especially his unusual postscript after the final episode).

Somerville and Ross weren’t writing satire. Their characters, in Bernard MacLaverty’s teleplay, are largely derisive peasants and aristocrats who debunk the myth of Ireland’s fanciful past (which was the credo of Ireland’s high-flown literature of the period).