Rebecca MacLean

I watched "Shroud for a Nightingale", one of my favorite novels of all time. While the cinematography was much more compelling than the original with Roy Marsden and Sheila Allen, they compressed the plot so tightly that much was left out. I am not so much speaking of subplots, which the story could advance without, but about character development. The whole thing seemed fast-tracked to such an extent that it was not really clear why certain things ended up as they did. What was, at least to me, the central relationship in the story, concerning a romantic obsession that ended in tragedy on a grand scale, was only barely hinted at. Also the ending was changed quite a bit. The original tv version, which ran for five hours (this new one is an hour and a half) followed the plot of the novel much more closely.