Dickens
Tom Birchenough
Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surely given him a very special quality in the nation's consciousness, a combination of general benignity with more than a hint of absent-mindedness, an almost madcap bafflement at the world.So I can’t have been the only one to wonder what he was going to make of Ebenezer Scrooge, and the top-hatted image of him that grins at us from the poster has the kind smile that we certainly associate with the character post- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Roger Rees, whose death at the age of 71 was announced yesterday, never intended to act. He trained at the Slade and made extra money painting theatrical scenery. One day a director asked if he’d like to act, and he laid down his brush. The second time he applied to join the RSC, he got in. He stayed with the company for a now unimaginable 22 years and in due course became one of the great stars of British theatre in the 1980s.He was a mercurial Hamlet, but overwhelmingly his best remembered performance was in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. The eight-and-a-half hours’ traffic Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Delve into the personal life of Charles Dickens and she emerges, revealing another side of an author whose stories seem so wholesome. According to The Invisible Woman author Claire Tomalin, Ralph Fiennes’ film about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress is very different from the book upon which it is based. Scripted by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady and Shame), The Invisible Woman, in which Fiennes stars and well as directs, gives us a more complex view of Dickens-as-man, albeit through a dark lens, literally and metaphorically.Ellen Lawless Ternan (Felicity Jones) lived from 1839 to 1914, yet almost Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so remarkably copious: the novels, the journals, the letters, the readings; the charitable works, the endless walks; the awful childhood, the army of children, the abruptly terminated marriage, the puzzling relationship with two sisters-in-law, the long and clandestine affair.Vanishingly few of those biographers have been women. One of the many virtues of Claire Tomalin’s compact life of Dickens – it just Read more ...
mark.kidel
Neil Bartlett, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Dickens adaptations of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, knows how to make gripping theatre out of a complex work of fiction. His Great Expectations rattles through the twists and turns of Pip’s coming of age with a pace that rarely lets up, so much so at times, that there is perhaps not enough space for reflection and the emotional complexity of Dickens’s mature doesn't fully come through.Bartlett has a command of storytelling through the transformation of everyday objects, the surprise and mood-changing potential of light and Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
The opening of Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities is among the most famous ever written: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…". If the publicity for this stage adaptation is to be believed, it is a scarcely less exalted addition to the mythology surrounding this novel.It was written by Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud in 1935, when Rattigan was a young, unknown playwright with only a couple of professional credits to his name, while Gielgud was already renowned for his self-directed performances as Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s nothing novel about novel-adaptations on stage. We’ve seen every classic from Pride and Prejudice to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Woman in White (and The Woman in Black) get the full theatrical treatment, and I’m not sure any have ended up the better for it. The power of a tale is in the telling, and unmoored from the delicate narrative handling of an Austen or a Dickens things can go horribly awry. And so it is with the West End’s latest – a touring production of Dickens’ Great Expectations that has stumbled mistakenly onto The Strand and is doing its best to brazen it out.Jo Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One has low expectations of Great Expectations. As the Dickens bicentenary draws to a close with yet another version, young Pip must once again come to the aid of the convict Magwitch, once again be raised up from apprentice blacksmith to gentleman, once again fall for the cold, unrequiting Estella Havisham. And once again make do without the first-person narrative that gives him his character. For this latest account Mike Newell, director of Four Weddings and the fourth Harry Potter, has teamed up with scriptwriter David One Day Nicholls, so you can intuit roughly what flavours Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No Dickens novel seems to come around the block more often than The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, possibly excepting Great Expectations, which is taking a bow on both big screen and small for the bicentenary year. Relatively recent assaults on the teeming 800-page doorstopper include adaptations by ITV, on the big screen, Radio 4 and Chichester Festival Theatre. That would surely count as enough Nicklebys already. But into this bustling crowd the BBC has thrust its own new version. Will it fight for its place in the world like the novel’s impetuous young hero, or be trampled Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature. Writing Britain goes one better (or worse): a tour of the whole island and its islands as seen through its writers, you can travel from Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall to Dr Johnson’s Hebrides entirely through the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Celebrations of Dickens’ bicentenary will soon be elbowed aside by the Olympics, Jubilee and European Football Championships. Amidst all that flag-waving, these two mid-20th century Dickens films convey a love for England’s landscape and character truer than patriotism.Alberto Cavalcanti, Ealing Studios’ Brazilian wild card, brings an outsider’s brisk enjoyment to his 1947 Nickleby. Set in the 1830s of Dickens’ youth, the bright garb of pre-Victorian fops and sunny Hampshire countryside make this black-and-white film dazzle with life. Cavalcanti finds film noir shadows and corners from which Read more ...