Review Details
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«In all the years I've been visiting Chichester - and God help my greying moustache, I can just about remember Laurence Olivier starting the National Theatre Company there - I can't recall a production being so rapturously received by its notoriously uptight punters.
For six-and-a-half hours of playing time it was as if they had decided to forget the heat, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, John Prescott and Tony Blair - and allowed themselves to be regenerated by that large, warm, life-giving organ, Dickens's heart.
Actually, this is the first major revival of a piece that back in 1980 made theatrical history, reducing the late Bernard Levin to ecstasies of joy in the process. David Edgar adapted; Trevor Nunn and John Caird directed; and the RSC developed a Nich Nick style that became so influential we still regularly see its artistic offspring. The "collective narrator", meaning the whole cast or selected members of it, kept us abreast of the story and of Dickens's sentiments: "wealth and poverty stand side by side" and so on. Characters talked of themsleves in the third person before launching into action, dialogue or both. And it took little more than a few chairs to create an office, an inn or a stageoach to Dotheboys Hall in faraway Yorkshire.
Though the cast is smaller and each member takes more roles, and though Edgar has somewhat trimmed his original script, it's the same with Jonathan Church and Philip Franks's fluent, pacey revival. I'm not saying that their actors always match the finest of those RSC pioneers: Roger Rees's ultra-decent Nicholas, David Threlfall unforgettably agonised as his mentally damaged friend Smike, and a bleak and wintry John Woodvine as his money-mad Uncle Ralph. But there's not a lacklustre performance on display.
More than Rees's prototype, Daniel Weyman's earnest intense Nicholas has the "violent streak" that impels him to thrash the evil schoolmaster Squeers: a lewd, smarmy Pip Donaghy fully capable of doubling as the dissolute Sir Mulberry Hawk. John Ramm's weird nasal honk seems to suit that eccentric force for good, Newman Noggs, and Bernard Lloyd's big, melodic vowels and even bigger stage presence more than fit Vincent Crummles, actor-manager of the theatre troupe Nicholas joins. Could Leigh Lawson be harder, grimmer as Ralph? Maybe. But David Dawson is an excellent Smike, a bereft, broken human puppy who twists, stammers, scuttles, wails, pleads and grabs the heart. And the contrast between the two characters clinches the point. Here's a world sick with avarice, envy, vanity, snobbery, ignorance and want: Dickens's world and, dare I say, our own.»
- Benedict Nightingale - The Times
