'BLUE' AND CRY

The 24th season of Masterpiece Theatre begins with the blue boy (PBS, Oct. 2, 9-10 p.m.), starring a top draw for the PBS audience, Emma Thompson, playing a pregnant Scottish woman haunted by the ghost of a century-dead little boy. Seeking to repair her crumbling marriage to Joe (My Left Foot's Adrian Dunbar), Thompson's Marie accompanies him to a rustic old hotel for a weekend- the same hotel where Joe had recently brought his mistress (Joanna Roth). The Blue Boy, written and directed by Paul Murton, is a slow muddle. It is frequently impossible to tell why Marie is rattled and teary: Is it because of her husband's philandering or the spectral visions she has of the boy turned blue from the freezing water? These two plot strands are never successfully intertwined. And because the production has been shaped as a star turn for Thompson-who's certainly good-the rest of the small cast seems lost and irrelevant. C

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