Andrew Davies, famed for ‘sexing-up’ the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice by putting Mr Darcy in a wet shirt, is courting literary controversy with his new BBC adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
The drama features incest and on-screen nudity. Davis says, ‘Tolstoy hints very clearly that the characters of Helene and Anatole Kuragin have been having an incestuous relationship. The convention of the day means that Tolstoy would never have actually written the scene.’