Dickens and theatre are endlessly linked. The most recent adaptation of his work is London Tide, primarily based by Ben Energy on Our Mutual Buddy – with songs by himself and PJ Harvey – and opening on the Nationwide Theatre in April. Provided that the novel depicts a London the place cash is the measure of all issues and the Thames is pitifully polluted, it appears a well timed enterprise.
However, keenly as I await it, I think it should increase all of the previous questions concerning the issues and pleasures of dramatising Dickens. What’s extraordinary is the deluge of Dickens variations over the a long time. In his personal lifetime, pirated variations of the novels have been rushed on to the stage even whereas they have been nonetheless being serialised: one adapter, WT Moncrieff, even challenged Dickens to finish Nicholas Nickleby “higher than I’ve finished”. I even have a cherished copy of a 1952 guide, Dickens the Dramatist, which itemises all of the stage variations of his books as much as that time. The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist head the recognition listing with greater than 25 entries every: the previous consists of an Esperanto model performed in Cambridge in 1907 and the latter, lengthy earlier than Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, yielded an 1891 operetta merely known as Bumble.
At this time you’re as more likely to discover Dickens on movie or TV as within the theatre, however there have been radical makes an attempt to change the way in which we stage the books. Probably the most pioneering was Shared Expertise’s four-part, 10-hour model of Bleak Home in 1977. Beneath the path of Mike Alfreds, the seven actors gave us the descriptions in addition to the dialogue and mimed the mandatory props.
That manufacturing was overshadowed in 1980 by the RSC’s celebrated two-part, eight-and-a-half-hour Nicholas Nickleby, tailored by David Edgar and co-directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, which grew to become successful in London and New York. Its methods, nonetheless, weren’t dissimilar to these utilized by Shared Expertise. Narration grew to become a part of the occasion and the actors’ our bodies created environment: the dismal London by way of which Ralph Nickleby lastly flees was evoked by the forged standing in mounted positions with their backs rigidly turned.
Since Nickleby, nice stress has been laid on the darker, Dostoevskian points of Dickens, as in David Farr’s model of Nice Expectations (2003). That very same novel was staged in 2005 by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod with completely different actors voicing Pip’s first-person narrative in a means that was distinctly Brechtian.
Now we have come a good distance from the scissors-and-paste cut-ups of earlier variations. Makes an attempt are actually made to offer us the feel of the prose in addition to the vividness of character and incident. Dramatists are additionally as more likely to invoke Kafka in staging Dickens because the writer himself was to say the New Testomony: you get hints of each in Jack Thorne’s excellent Previous Vic model of A Christmas Carol. And but, whereas nothing will ever halt the ceaseless flood of Dickens dramatisations, I nonetheless harbour a couple of aesthetic doubts.
Jonathan Miller within the guide Subsequent Performances makes the purpose that fictional characters are “made out of the identical materials because the novels by which they happen” and can’t be liberated from them: to take action, as Miller wittily says, provides the characters an “impudent visibility”. You could possibly argue that Phiz’s illustrations to Dickens’s novels did precisely that, however I do know what Miller means. Certainly, the extra profitable an adaptation is, the extra it interferes with the transaction between the reader and the author: returning to Oliver Twist a couple of years in the past, I discovered pictures from the David Lean movie continually got here between me and the textual content.
Within the case of Dickens, I’d additionally argue that no adaptation can ever seize the surreal high quality of his creativeness. In The Pickwick Papers, a timorous card-player is claimed to have felt as a lot out of his component as “a dolphin in a sentry-box”. Miller in his guide cites the instance of Mr Wemmick in Nice Expectations, who has a mouth like a letter-box into which he posts his meals versus consuming it. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge sees in a door-knocker Marley’s face, which had a dismal mild about it “like a foul lobster in a darkish cellar”. These pictures are to me testaments to Dickens’s genius.
I recognise that stage variations of Dickens will go on for ever however, if I’m sincere, I’ve bought much more pleasure from one-person exhibits. Simon Callow, an amazing Dickensian, did an excellent rendering of two monologues, Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, which introduced out the social criticism and comedian grotesquerie of the 2 tales. Miriam Margolyes folded into her portrayal of Dickens’s Ladies, with its vivid portrayal of 20 or extra characters, her personal views on his questionable non-public behaviour. As an adolescent, I used to be additionally captivated by seeing Emlyn Williams do his readings from Dickens which, within the model of the writer himself, was a feat of unimaginable theatrical virtuosity. Pleasant as variations could be, paradoxically it’s the solo performer who usually brings out finest the multiplicity of Dickens.
