Dickens and theater are forever linked. The latest adaptation of his work is London Tide, Ben Power’s adaptation of Our Mutual Friend, featuring songs by himself and PJ Harvey, and opens at the National Theater in April. Considering that the novel depicts a London where money is the measure of all things and the River Thames is pitifully polluted, this seems like a timely venture.
But I suspect that this book, which I am eagerly awaiting, will raise all the old questions about the problems and pleasures of dramatizing Dickens. What is remarkable is the abundance of Dickens adaptations over the decades. During his own lifetime, pirated versions of the novels appeared on the scene while they were still being serialized: an adapter named WT Moncrieff challenged Dickens to finish Nicholas Nickleby “better than I could”. I also have a valuable copy of the 1952 book Dickens the Dramatist, which lists all the stage versions up to that point. The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist top the popularity list, with more than 25 entries each: the former includes an Esperanto version played in Cambridge in 1907, and the latter, simply called Bumble, long before Lionel Bart’s Oliver! He gave the 1891 operetta.
Today you’re as likely to find Dickens in film or television as in theatre, but there have also been radical attempts to change the way we stage the books. The most pioneering of these was Shared Experience’s four-part, 10-hour remake of 1977’s Bleak House. Seven actors, under the direction of Mike Alfreds, gave us exposition as well as dialogue and mimed the necessary props.
This production was overshadowed by the RSC’s famous 1980 two-part, eight-and-a-half-hour Nicholas Nickleby, adapted by David Edgar and co-directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, which was a hit in London and New York. . However, their techniques were no different from those used by Shared Experience. The narration became part of the action, and the actors’ bodies created the atmosphere: the gloomy London from which Ralph Nickleby finally escaped was portrayed by the actors standing in fixed positions, with their backs turned straight.
Since Nickleby, much emphasis has been placed on the darker, Dostoyevskian aspects of Dickens, as in David Farr’s version of Great Expectations (2003). The same novel was staged in 2005 by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, with different actors voicing Pip’s first-person narrative in a distinctly Brechtian manner.
We’ve come a long way from the scissors-and-paste cuts of previous adaptations. We are now trying to give us the texture of the prose as well as the liveliness of character and event. Playwrights are as likely to invoke Kafka when staging Dickens as the author invokes the New Testament: you get hints of both in Jack Thorne’s remarkable Old Vic version, A Christmas Carol. And yet, although nothing can stop Dickens’s incessant torrent of dramatization, I still have some doubts about the aesthetics.
In his book Subsequent Performances, Jonathan Miller emphasizes that fictional characters are “made of the same stuff as the novels in which they appear” and cannot be rescued from them: To do so, as Miller humorously puts it, “gives the characters an ‘insolent visibility'”. You could argue that Phiz’s illustrations for Dickens’ novels do exactly that, but I know what Miller means. In fact, the more successful an adaptation is, the more it hinders the exchange between reader and writer: When I returned to Oliver Twist a few years ago, I found images from the David Lean film constantly interfering with the text.
In the case of Dickens, I also argue that no adaptation can capture the surreal quality of his imagination. In The Pickwick Papers, a timid card player is said to feel as alien as “a dolphin in a guardhouse.” In his book, Miller cites the example of Mr. Wemmick in Great Expectations, who has a mouth like a mailbox into which he puts his food instead of eating it. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge sees Marley’s face knocking on the door; this face bore a gloomy light, “like an evil lobster in a dark cellar.” These images are, for me, testament to Dickens’ genius.
I realize the stage versions of Dickens will go on forever, but to be honest I enjoyed the one-man shows even more. Simon Callow, a great Dickensian, brings out the social criticism and comic grotesquery of the two stories in Dr. He gave an excellent rendition of two monologues, Marigold and Mr. Chops. Miriam Margolyes brought her own views on his controversial private behavior to her portrait of Dickens’s Women, which vividly portrays 20 or more characters. As a teenager, I was also fascinated to see Emlyn Williams reading from Dickens; This was, in the author’s own way, an incredible feat of theatrical mastery. As enjoyable as the adaptations are, paradoxically it is often the solo artist who best brings out Dickens’s diversity.