Unforgivably boring

Thomas Love Peacock gets five stars. Everything else associated with the production gets one star. This is a dutiful, un-nuanced slog through 37 hours of a great 19th century novelist. There is no indication that the readers (you can't call them actors) have any idea at all of the sense of what they are reading. Their idea of acting is to put on funny voices, usually deep fruity ones that are often very difficult to understand (or impossible to understand if you are in a car). They stumble over unusual words. They miss any nuances (and that includes comedy, an essential ingredient of a comic novel.)
It is unfair to single anyone or anything out as the worst bit, but it would be wrong not give a special shout-out to the "music". Peacock's novels are full of verses, and when the cast have to deal with them they make their voices waver up and down with no accompaniment, no tune, and no harmony. It is like a listening to a half-deaf man trying to bluff his way in a choir by mumbling along, raising or lowering his voice because that is what the rest of the choir did five seconds ago. A description doesn’t help; to appreciate its full awfulness so listen, if you can bear it, to the songs in Chapter 4 of "The Misfortunes of Elphin". I guarantee you will never have heard anything worse.
On the upside, when you have listened to 37 hours of this, you will feel as though it has lasted as many weeks, and you have lived considerably longer than you have. Though not enjoyably.

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