The film tells the story of the relationship
between the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and looks
at its relation to Plath’s psychological problems and
her blossoming into one of the twentieth century’s
most important poets.
At the start of the film Sylvia is already
an academic wunderkind, but she burns with ambition to become
a successful poet. Arriving in Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship,
she is a splash of brash American colour against a backdrop
of a dour Britain in the grip of Fifties austerity. The disappointment
of a bad review for a poem she’s submitted to a university
magazine is alleviated when she reads a poem by a young English
graduate called Ted Hughes. She determines to meet him. Cornering
him at a drunken launch party for the literary magazine,
there is immediately an intensity about their connection.
From the moment they set eyes on each other their fates are
inextricably intertwined.
They meet again in London, where Ted
lives in post graduate squalor with like-minded friends.
After a drunken evening of quick fire, competitive poetry
reciting, the two make love for the first time. Ted notices
a scar on Sylvia’s face and asks her how she got
it. She tells him the story of her attempted suicide. The
passion
of their early courtship is intensified by the sharing
of her pain.
They marry. Sylvia directs her own boundless
energies into the business of establishing Ted’s literary
reputation. She types up his manuscripts time and time again
and sends out two copies for every rejection letter she gets
back. Her industry is rewarded when they hear news that Ted
has worn the New York Poetry Prize. They are ecstatic and
decide to uproot and go and live in America. Sylvia’s
mother, Aurelia, has laid on a welcome home party for Sylvia.
In a quiet moment she points out to Ted where they found
Sylvia’s near dead body. She entreats him to look after
her, to be good to her always.
Ted and Sylvia decamp to the Coast at Cape
Cod for a summer of uninterrupted writing. Sylvia dreams
of the poems, the novels she will write, but when she sits
down with her typewriter, she finds that nothing comes. Ted
tells Sylvia she has to dare to dig deeper with her writing,
to unearth hidden thoughts and feelings.
But the practicalities of life intervene
and Sylvia has to take up an appointment teaching English
at Smith’s College. Here Ted is surrounded constantly
by young female undergraduates and feted among all the literary
circles of the East Coast. Sylvia becomes increasingly jealous
both of Ted’s professional success and more problematically
about the attention he both receives and gives to other women.
Frustration and exhaustion conspire against her and culminate
in an ugly and violent argument over Ted’s supposed
dalliance with a female student at Smith.
Running away from their troubles, Ted and
Sylvia return to London. Sylvia gives birth to Frieda and
Ted’s already burgeoning reputation is further established
by the championing of literary critics such as Al Alvarez.
Sylvia completes her first volume of poetry The Colossus,
but the critical reception is luke warm. Her disappointment
is compounded by Ted’s increasing industry. When he
fails to return from a meeting with a radio producer, Sylvia
explodes at him.
Again they move – this time to Devon.
In letting their London flat they meet a couple called David
and Assia Wevill. David is a poet as well and they talk about
all meeting again in Devon.
Ted and Sylvia have a second child, Nicholas. However, when Assia and David
visit the couple in their country home at Court Green, Sylvia becomes convinced
of an attraction between Ted and Assia. Her conviction is such that she sends
Assia and David home. Ted goes up to London to pursue work soon after and does
begin an affair with Assia. Sylvia confronts Ted and exposes the truth. Ted
leaves the family home. Distraught and almost in a trance of grief, Sylvia
experiences a poetic outpouring of astonishing power and profusion.
In an attempt to escape the isolation she
feels in Devon and partly to keep the possibility of reconciliation
with Ted alive, Sylvia moves back to London finding a home
in Primrose Hill. Amidst the hardest winter of the century
Sylvia’s mental state deteriorates further until she
realises she is no longer capable of looking after her children.
In one last desperate act she arranges
to meet Ted and proposes that they try to forget everything
that has happened and begin again. But although part of him
wants to return to Sylvia, Ted is forced to tell her that
Assia is pregnant with his child. Her desperation is final.
A haunting stillness overcomes her.
She tucks the children into their beds,
protecting them from the cold as she opens their bedroom
window. In the kitchen she seals the gap in the door with
towels and tape. She prepares meticulously and methodically
for her end.
By morning the children are found by a
nurse who has been sent to check that Sylvia is coping. Sylvia’s
body is found, she has gassed herself. Ted is devastated.
On her desk he finds the completed manuscript of her poems,
(which later form the collection Ariel), it is her goodbye
note, her valediction and the work that will guarantee her
reputation in posterity.
Production Story
“ Sylvia did not really get acknowledged for her poetry until after her
death and this is the irony of the story of Ted and Sylvia. She wanted two things
out of her life, one was lasting acclaim and fame for her work and the other
was the great love of a man and ultimately she was only able to get one by losing
the other – which is her great tragedy.” (Alison Owen, Producer)
The Genesis of the film
“The film is very much a love story
and Sylvia Plath’s movie as she tries to cope as a
creative person and a mother. I was interested not only in
the love story but also the implications of two powerful
creative forces being brought together and how that made
their lives so difficult for each other”, says Christine
Jeffs, director of SYLVIA whose introduction to the project
was somewhat unusual. The project had been in development
for a number of years through producer Alison Owen and Jeffs
recalls: “I was called on my farm in New Zealand by
my agent who said you’ve got to read this script and
when I realized it was a movie about Sylvia Plath it was
a dream come true for me. The next stage was to meet with
Gwyneth and the financiers – one day I was on the farm
with my horses and the next day I had to leave for New York.”
For Alison Owen, who had been developing
the film for some years through her company Ruby Films, the
process was rather more complicated: “I’ve always
been interested in Sylvia Plath – I’ve been a
fan since I was a teenager, like lots of teenage girls, and
I had always thought it was a great love story between Ted
and Sylvia. But I guess what made me feel that I had permission
to make the film was when Ted published Birthday Letters
just before his death, because he’d been notoriously
private in his life until then and these last poems were
a wonderful work of art, very beautiful and opened up the
subject of his relationship with Sylvia. It felt that it
was somehow a tacit granting of permission to look at the
subject.”
Owen’s first concern was to find
a writer who would treat the subject matter with respect
and care. John Brownlow, the writer she approached, originally
comes from a documentary background. Says Owen: “He
was meticulous in terms of the research and employed a researcher
who interviewed many of Ted and Sylvia’s friends and
acquaintances. Therefore we had our own body of information
in addition to all the source material that existed.” She
continues: “John did an enormous amount of research,
then he sat down and wrote, and said it was the only time
as a writer that he felt the muse was sitting on his shoulder.
He had the information, sat down, and the story unfolded
in front of him – and I think that fluidity shows in
what he has produced.”
Brownlow had been interested in the project
as soon as Owen (with whom he had been working on another
project) mentioned her desire to make a film about Sylvia
Plath: “It was Sylvia Plath’s poetry that had
led to my own decision when at Oxford University to switch
from a Mathematics degree to an English degree.” He
continues: “I was initially cautious, not because of
the potentially fraught nature of the project – I was
formerly an investigative documentary film maker and used
to tackling controversial subjects – but because I
did not know how I was going to put words into the mouths
of two literary giants and I wanted to be sure we were telling
a story that had some kind of universal appeal, rather than
only speaking to poetry fans, and I didn’t yet know
what that would be.”
Having carried out extensive research over
a number of months Brownlow “finally found the story
I had been looking for, which was essentially to focus entirely
on the relationship between Ted and Sylvia, more or less
from the moment they met until the moment she died. This
seemed to me to be a universal story, because here were two
people who did what we all dream of – they met the
person they were destined to be with. The problem was they
also had the capacity to destroy each other - you could even
argue that that was what they found most attractive in each
other. You don’t even have to have heard of Ted Hughes
and Sylvia Plath to find that a compelling story, or to want
to know how it will turn out.”
Owen still had to find a director
and having seen Christine Jeffs’ film Rain knew that
she had found what she was looking for: “When we
were looking for a director, more than anything we wanted
somebody who could move an audience, because that’s
ultimately what the film is going to succeed or fail on – the
ability to move. When I saw Rain I could not speak for
five minutes afterwards and felt emotionally exhausted.
It’s an extraordinary film, and I knew that Christine
would make a great job of our script. From there on it
was an easy road, Christine already knew a lot about Sylvia
Plath and was a fan of hers.” |
