Life in Squares

Life in Squares is a confusing and dull three part period drama about the tangled love affairs of the Bloomsbury Group.

Virginia (Lydia Leonard) married Leonard Woolf (Al Weaver) who soon realises that she is mentally fragile, while her sister Vanessa (Phoebe Fox) turned her affections towards Duncan Grant (James Norton) who teams up with her and his male lover. In fact Grant is the love and leave em kind when it comes to male relationships.

As the drama progresses the younger actors are replaced by an older set of actors and the Bloomsbury group attitude towards free love and creativity gets bleaker as World War Two approaches and losses are felt.

Amanda Coe's script was not easy to follow and seemed sparse which explains why I felt bored and listless.

Scandinavian director Simon Kaijser goes for Nordic noir pacing and a murky look which did not work for this three parter that needed to be faster moving and brighter.

I TRIED (I really did) with the first episode of LIFE IN SQUARES but after twenty minutes my brain started to dig a tunnel through my spine and tried to escape the UTTER TEDIUM of this smug little series. Worse, the episode moved with all the speed and urgency of a glacier, unlike my brain digging the escape tunnel.

It was like being trapped in a room with a gang of self-regarding teenage Hipsters and Emos all moving in slow motion because of clinical depression.

Frankly (and this is rare) I gave up after that twenty minutes and I won't be returning.

Were the Bloomsbury Set a significant collection of artistic types who paved the way for the freedoms we enjoy today or a bunch of tedious and ultimately irrelevant posers only of interest to similar posers who write long serials for the BBC? Discuss.

Confused look at the Bloomsbury Group over several decades. This 3-part miniseries jumbles the narrative time and the actors so that it's a confusing mishmash. Some actors play the same part over time and others change. The various actresses who play Virginia and Vanessa look nothing like each other and the dumbest bit is Eve Best (a dead ringer for Virginia) playing Vanessa.

None of the people are particularly likable and maybe they weren't in real life. They come off as self-absorbed boobs. Maybe they were. But this makes for an unappealing 3 hours.

Some viewers may be shocked at the sexual escapades among the group members but sex existed even in this post-Victorian era.

Given that this short series involves quite a few flashbacks and a relatively large cast of characters, the choice to have different actors play the "younger" and "older" versions of some of them really doesn't help, I think. Not only does this make it hard sometimes to work out who they are, but it leads to harsh comparisons of the performance (and in some cases the looks) of a few of them. Apart from the children, this would have been better done with make-up, I feel. In particular, Phoebe Fox is so great as Vanessa Bell that she is sorely missed in episode three. No offence to Eve Best, but she comes across as a completely different person - not only does she look nothing like Fox, but Vanessa feels "gone".

Having said that, it was nice not to have painful and protracted exposition of who all these people were, as collectively there would have been too much to fit in - and the series would have felt even more episodic than it sometimes does. As it is, the classic period drama cliches of "terrible things happening far away" are present and correct, as are their very real tragic effects, but the underlying aura of very privileged people playing around lingers.

Worth a look - although really only a 6 out of 10, IMHO. I gave it the 7th for Phoebe.

It's part two of Life in Squares tonight about the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf on BBC2 tonight at 21.00. In the first episode we romped through nearly ten years and saw how the embryonic group grew out of some Cambridge male graduates in the modern Bohemian squares of Bloomsbury. They were young free and single and OK. for money and everything was exciting. We saw how the complex relationships of Vanessa (nee Stephen) Bell, Virginia (nee Stephen) Woolf and the death of Thoby Stephen who brought the group together for their Thursday evening meetings. Painter Vanessa Stephen and her writer sister Virginia embarked on a life of unexpected and emerged from the whaleboned strictures of Victoria England. It was a remarkably accurate portrayal and covered a lot of ground in a short hour long program. I loved the lighting and treatment of some difficult subjects which set up tonight's second episode for an exciting continuation.