by Hugh Walpole
[Starring] Donald Wolfit
with Mark Dignam, Kathleen Michael
(See facing page)

The Tomb of the Black Bishop in Polchester Cathedral is not described in any guide-book, and Polchester itself, the home of Archdeacon Brandon, cannot be identified as either Truro or Exeter, though it is unmistakably in the west of England. It is a city created by Hugh Walpole's own imagination, assisted by memories of the various cathedral cities where he lived during his boyhood, and used as the setting for five or six of his novels, including The Cathedral and the Jeremy series.

Tonight's television play gives us the unusual privilege of going inside Polchester's famous cathedral, which provides an impressive and in some ways symbolic background for a drama of personal conflicts and human vanities in the year of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. In particular it is the drama of Adam Brandon, the Archdeacon (played by Sir Donald Wolfit), who finds his previously undisputed mastery of cathedral and diocese suddenly challenged by the advent of a newcomer.

The clash between a proud man, sure of his own rectitude, and forces working against him is the kind of situation that Hugh Walpole always handled with great dexterity. When the suave and quietly ambitious Canon Ronder comes to Polchester, Archdeacon Brandon is on top of the world-handsome, assured, vigorous, and domineering, with an apparently admiring wife, a good-looking son at Oxford, and an amiable daughter who has just left school. Yet from that moment his position, both public and private, begins to crumble beneath him, and in every misfortune he seems to see the hand of his enemy, Ronder.
As a book The Cathedral was notable for its skilful intermingling of ecclesiastical and domestic affairs. This is faithfully preserved in the television play, so that the question of who should be the next rector of Pybus St. Anthony (an issue in which Brandon's conservatism is directly opposed by Ronder's more progressive outlook) becomes as absorbing as the story of Mrs. Brandon's revolt against her husband.
The novel's elaborate picture of social life in a Victorian cathedral city, as recalled by an author writing in 1922, could hardly be presented in detail in a dramatic version; but there are fascinating glimpses of a world of clerical tea-parties and inveterate gossips (delightfully typified by Ellen Stiles), of visits to the circulating library in search of Mr. Barrie's latest book, and of a caste system dominated by the aristocratic St. Leaths at 'the Castle.'
Viewers who know the book may be disappointed (as I am) to find that Annie Hogg, the stalwart, independent and attractive daughter of a Polchester publican, has vanished from the story. But some characters had inevitably to be sacrificed, and in general the adaptation ingeniously covers most of the principal events. (Edgar Holt)