Casting About for Goliaths to Tell Story of ‘David’

It is a story filled with tragedy and comedy. Love and death. Pain and loss. Tears and laughter. Good and evil.

But most important, Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” is about the necessity of family.

“It is an homage to a family,” says Simon Curtis, director of the lavish new adaptation for “Masterpiece Theatre,” which airs Sunday and Monday on PBS. “Just like nowadays, a family in the book comes in many different shapes and sizes. It’s not just the conventional two parents.”

First appearing in England and America in serialized form in 1849 and published the following year as a single novel, “David Copperfield” was an immediate success with readers and critics. It was also Dickens’ personal favorite--and for good reason. Based on his own arduous journey to manhood, “Copperfield” was the most autobiographical of Dickens’ 15 novels.

The new three-hour version, which aired in England on Christmas, stars 10-year-old Daniel Radcliff as the young David and Irish actor Ciaran McMenamin as the older hero. The production also stars several of England’s top actors.

Bob Hoskins is the optimistic Mr. Micawber, who befriends young David when the boy is forced to work in a glue factory in London; two-time Oscar winner Maggie Smith plays David’s eccentric but loving Aunt Betsey, who adopts the orphan; and Ian McKellen is the evil schoolmaster, Mr. Creakle.

Director Curtis (“The Student Prince”) hadn’t even read “David Copperfield” before landing the assignment as director. “I only discovered it recently,” he confesses, adding that he spent his youth watching “The Brady Bunch,” not reading the classics.

Before production began, Curtis reacquainted himself with the beloved 1935 George Cukor adaptation, which starred Freddie Bartholomew as David and W.C. Fields as Micawber. But he found more inspiration in the 1970 NBC TV version directed by Delbert Mann.

“I thought they made a mistake chopping up the structure,” he says of the 1970 version. “I very much wanted ours to be chronological as in a life, but the casting in that one was truly inspirational. Seeing Laurence Olivier play Creakle gave me the confidence to approach Ian McKellen for ours. I thought, ‘Who would be the best possible cast in the world for this story?’ Frankly, I think I got it.”

Curtis searched high and low for his Davids. “In both cases, I didn’t want a sort of English fop, which I thought would be alienating to modern audiences. Both actors have something contemporary about them, even though they are very credible [in the 19th century].”

McMenamin admits to having a few panic attacks during the filming last year. “It was a big job to be put on your shoulders,” says the self-effacing actor.

“I wasn’t worried about the English accent or anything like that. I was, maybe, more worried about, as a modern man, to feel what it was like to live in that time. But things fall into place when you start rehearsing.”

Because David is a passive character who has to react to the chaos around him, McMenamin explains that playing him was an “exercise in how many facial expressions you had in your locker. There are not many emotional peaks and valleys. Everything happens through his eyes. That was very difficult because a lot of it was trying to do little, but everything at once.”

Though producer Kate Harwood says that “David Copperfield” is Dickens’ most accessible novel, it is also one of the most difficult to adapt dramatically because it doesn’t have a real plot.

“In many ways it is very episodic,” Harwood says. “It is a story of a life lived. As such, it takes you in a very linear way through a group of characters who are so fabulously defined. The emotion and the journey of the central character is so passionate and moving that it’s always involving.”

* “Masterpiece Theatre: David Copperfield” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on KCET and KVCR. The network has rated it TV-PG (some material may be unsuitable for younger children).