Dickens
Heather Neill
"Dickensian" commonly means both sentimental Victorian, apple-cheeked family perfection (especially at Christmas) and abject poverty. The story of Scrooge encompasses both as the old curmudgeon learns to mend his miserly ways and open his heart to others in a tale of redemption.Matthew Warchus's enveloping production has already had two successful outings here (with Rhys Ifans in the "Bah Humbug" role in 2017 and Stephen Tompkinson last year) and another iteration of it has just opened on Broadway.This version, by Jack Thorne (a writer whose work is familiar to all-age audiences for Harry Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Red Pleasance Dome ★★★★Comic Marcus Brigstocke has spoken in the past about his addictions and now he has written this two-hander, which he directs, that goes some way to explain the constant internal dialogue he and others like him experience.Benedict has been sober for 20-odd years but faces a big emotional challenge when his father dies. On the day of his dad's funeral we see him in John's extensive cellar, where a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1978, the year of his birth, awaits him, as he reads a letter from John gifting it to him.As Benedict confronts his emotions about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After the heart-breaking ending to the third series earlier this year, which covered the death of William Shakespeare's young son, Hamnet, it was back to the comedy for this seasonal special. But there was no jarring handbrake turn for writer Ben Elton who, like his hero the Bard, has form in melding tragedy and comedy to great effect. Rather he used that storyline to make a narratively sound segue from loss to laughter; in A Crow Christmas Carol the Shakespeares, feeling unable to celebrate the season at their home in Stratford-upon-Avon, decide to spend the holiday at Will's lodgings Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
The Old Vic's revival of its successful Christmas Carol first seen this time last year had me at the mince pies: they were served before curtain up by a Bob Cratchit figure while we admired the shoal of Victorian lanterns lighting the way over a cross-shaped stage that cuts the audience into quarters. Top-hatted gentlemen and gentleladies in swishing black great coats strolled about tossing oranges. One waved a sign that said, "Please do not use your mobile phones in the auditorium," which could have been more appropriately phrased but did at least keep the devices from being doused in the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It sounds like a marriage made in heaven. Charles Dickens and James Graham – both great chroniclers of the ambitions, hypocrisies, and eccentricities of their respective ages – have been brought together to tell London’s story through irreverent portraits of its high life and low life. This modern Sketches by Boz reboots the Victorian original to embrace computer hackers, a Syrian asylum seeker, and mock conceptual artists among others. The result is a lively, structurally ambitious work that somehow fails to add up to the sum of its potentially fascinating parts.Graham – who has Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Fresh from the success of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Jack Thorne now gives us his exuberant adaptation of another much-loved text. Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol is the well-worn morality fable seared into our collective memory by countless screen versions and stage musicals. Matthew Warchus' new production places much emphasis on Scrooge’s philosophy that the poor have brought their misfortune upon themselves – Victorian sanctimony chiming with 21st century austerity. It’s a dark message embedded in a Christmas treat.Chunks of Dickens’ text unspool on stage as the cast Read more ...
David Edgar
Since mid-August, I’ve been doing something I swore I’d never do again. I’ve been rehearsing a new adaptation of a novel by Charles Dickens. Sometime in the autumn of 1979, I received a phone call from Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He explained that the company wanted to do a version of a Dickens novel, and would I be interested in adapting it?As my brain rushed chaotically through what I remembered of the Dickens canon, he explained that the choice was down to two: the dark and majestic late novel Our Mutual Friend and the earlier picaresque jollity Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted biographer, Claire Tomalin has been at the heart of the literati glitterati all her working life. Here she turns her forensic sharp eye on herself in a life that even her nonagenarian father characterised as hard, although she herself sees it as privileged.Of course, both are right. Her parents – a clever very young Frenchman, Émile Delavaney, infatuated by both the English language and its literature, and her mother Muriel Herbert, a gifted musician and composer Read more ...
Susan Sheahan
Much loved, yes. But Dickens’s novel is probably little read by modern audiences and so a chance to see a new adaptation of this tale of discontent, riot and general mayhem set in the French revolution and spread across London and Paris in the late 1700s should be a genuine treat for theatregoers. And on paper Matthew Dunster’s version for Regent's Park of this intense exploration of injustice (billed, in fact, as "a new play") has it all: love, death, comedy, revolution and the promise of a provocative exploration of the underlying issues of power, oppression and tragedy connecting how we Read more ...
Matthew Dunster
When you are adapting a novel like A Tale of Two Cities, it's a privilege to sit with a great piece of writing for a considerable amount of time. You also feel secure (and a bit cheeky) in the knowledge that another writer has already done most of the work.I always have an eye on the final production, whether I'm directing it or not. I want to always be thinking about what theatre and theatre artists can achieve on behalf of the novel. So the adaptations hopefully aren't like dialogue-led plays, more like scores for the theatre. Tim Sheader, the director, and I, love Dickens. We re-read Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are around 800 pages in a Dickensian doorstopper and it has been said around 800 times that if Dickens were working today he would be a show runner on a soap. Finally it has come to pass. Andrew Davies attempted something similar with his Bleak House, diced up into half-hour gobbets. But Dickensian is nothing less – or maybe that should be nothing more – than EastEnders in top hats and mobcaps.Its 20 episodes have been scheduled over that time of year which Dickens wishes could happen all the year round, two episodes a day. Its scriptwriter Tony Jordan, formerly of EastEnders, had Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Dickens’s public readings from his novels were almost as famous and popular as the novels themselves. He would write special scripts that gave prominence to particular characters and that dramatized the salient events of each story; and of all these performances, A Christmas Carol was one of the favourites, his and his audiences’. So what better idea than to turn this unforgettable tale into an opera: an opera for a single singer, dramatizing the story, impersonating all the main characters, being, as it were, Dickens himself with added music?Iain Bell’s opera, new last year but performed Read more ...