There was one terrifically erotic moment in the first episode of Anna Karenina (Channel 4). Kitty is playing on the piano, where she is joined by Levin. He at first echoes the tune she is playing, then begins to branch out on his own, the theme he plays complementing and enhancing hers. It's a cliche that the sexiest possible shot is of a bedroom door closing, from the outside - that's a silly line peddled by Ronald Reagan - but this time the metaphor really worked. It was a short scene, but a powerful one, helped by the fact that Douglas Henshall, whose wild untamed hair gives him the manner of a hippy dot.com tycoon, actually looks sexy.
If Anna had fallen for Levin, we could have understood it. As it is, she wrecks her life for the sake of Vronsky, who reminds me of Major James Hewitt, a more recent love-rat, whose affair with a much-loved and beautiful aristocrat was also greeted with the same cry from millions of people, `For heaven's sake, why him?'
We're told that this new production has a `modern' feel, which it does, though I'm not certain that's a good idea. It needs a certain distance and formality to remind us of what an unimaginable risk Anna is taking. In a `modern' drama series, threshing legs and arms usually mean sexual and hence psychological fulfilment; if one party is escaping from a terminally tedious partner, all the better for them. But Anna was playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the six chambers. Kevin McKidd is a perfectly competent actor, and he has lots of blond hair, but we can't believe anyone would destroy herself for the sake of him. In the scene where Anna says of her husband, `I had to tell him,' the emotional turmoil would have been appropriate if she had said, `I had to tell him we had a flat tyre.'
Adapted from an article by Simon Hoggart, The Spectator May 13 th 2000