Eddie Redmayne and Clemence Poesy to star in Birdsong
The heartbreaking story of clandestine romance and trench warfare captured in the best-selling novel Birdsong will go before the cameras, with Eddie Redmayne and Clemence Poesy as the passionate but illicit lovers.
The two actors, both fast-rising stars, will lead the three-part television production, which will begin filming on locations in Hungary in the middle of next month.
Birdsong, written by Sebastian Faulks and published to much acclaim in 1993, begins in pre-World War I northern France as a love story between young Englishman Stephen Wraysford, who works in Amiens, and Isabelle Azaire, the much younger, unhappy second wife of a bullying textile factory owner.
Faulks later hurls us into the hell of Flanders in 1916 and we meet Stephen — who by this time is a soldier on the Western Front — again.
The other important character here is Jack Firebrace (a part as yet uncast) — a tunneller who seems to represent the bravery of the ordinary Englishman.
