Life & Times Grief, hallucinations, and Poldark: an interview with Jack Farthing Jack Farthing plays George Warleggan in ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Poldark. Aficionados of Winston Graham’s Roger Jones rollicking adventure series, set in Cornwall BJGP, 30 Euston Square, London NW1 2FB, UK. at the turn of the century — 18th that is — Email:
[email protected] will need no explanation, but the uninitiated need to know that George is Captain Ross Poldark’s nemesis in love, business, and and subjected him to bleeding, blistering, politics, a banker and an all-round bad egg. cupping, sedation, restraint, and iced At the end of the last series, when it began baths. George ended up wandering the to look as though George might have it all, Cornish countryside in his nightshirt and his wife Elizabeth died, shockingly, from came close to suicide. He was saved puerperal sepsis. As you may have seen, in by the wise and gentle Dr Dwight Enys, the early episodes of the current, and final, who has already graced the pages of the series of Poldark, George descended into BJGP,2 and whose compassionate ‘talk and, eventually, emerged from the depths therapy’ — 19th-century CBT — enabled of grief. George to gradually recover his normal self. Enys’s therapeutic approach involved GRIEF taking Warleggan to his wife’s grave, and Initial denial was followed by episodes of into the bedroom where she died. His ‘no hallucinations accompanied by thoughts locked doors’ policy has echoes of radical of self-destruction. Warleggan initially liberal approaches to the care of psychotic suppressed his grief, ordering portraits of patients in the 1970s.