MUD, MARSH, MONEY
Now here’s a bracing new way to do Dickens: avoid sets full of Victoriana by keeping the stage pretty much empty beneath a set of uneasily moving lighting-bars evocative of a tidal river. Cut out all the harrumphing Cheeryble rhetoric and lovable Peggotying; choose a late, least-familiar novel and get Ben Power to fillet the meaning out of the story in short scenes, as he did with the Lehman Trilogy. Then find a modern , eerily original and hypnotic songwriter – PJ Harvey – to set thirteen songs for individuals and whole-cast chorus at moments of high emotion.
I suspect Ian Rickson’s production , based on Our Mutual Friend, will be, as they say, Marmite. It’s over three hours long , lacks set-piece glamour, has no desire to razzle-dazzle you, and Bunny Christie’s strange set of moving bars of light overhead may be downright unsettling until you see it as reflections from our ancient uneasy estuary.
But it is a sort of weird masterpiece and exactly what the NT should be doing. I was drawn into the idea of the murky old river-life of the London Thames from the moment the cast (21 strong) scrambled singing from the downstage pit and Jake Wood’s Gaffer Hexam – a plank representing his boat – found a drowned corpse, picked its pockets as was his way, and towed it home while his gentle daughter Lizzie (Ami Tredrea) began narrating their world.
The plot has all the intricate bonkers quality we love in Dickens: a bad old miser has left his money , made in “dust” – rubbish disposal – to his son John who ran off to Africa. But the condition is that John marries Bella, from a low-born but respectable family. Since the returning son is thought to be the corpse, the money goes to Noddy Boffin, an employee who is thus propelled into the affluent middle classes and adopts Bella into his richer home out of kindness. Baffled by business, he takes on a secretary who is of course actually the non-dead John (Tom Mothersdale). He observes and falls in love with Bella, who is getting a bit flighty in her new upper-middle status and unkind to her honest struggling real family. Meanwhile back down the social scale Gaffer the corpse-fishing riverman is thought to be a murderer, and dies – leaving daughter Eliza to struggle alone to get her brother Charley the education which will enable him to rise in society, while their reputation is blighted by the father’s crime.
Which by the way he didn’t do. Oh, and up in Holborn – each London district flagged in surtitle – there are lawyers, as ever in Dickens, including Eugene (Jamael Westman) who is fated to fall in love with Lizzie and educate her by reading Ovid together in the sunset beside Deptford Creek.
So it’s all about money and class and injustice and deprivation and the upward struggle of education, and it’s complicated. But Rickson keeps it absolutely clear: characters are drawn economically but sharply, Bella McLean’s Bella able, within brief moments of dialogue, to develop and grow up. The two romantic heroes’ glamour is offset by the fact that by and large the women have more sense than the men, though tending to be victims of their own generosity (Dickens by this time knew a lot about that, not to his credit).
And there are moments of great entertainment: some considerable laughs are provided by Jenny Wren, fiery little Ellie-May Sheridan on a lovely professional debut as the teenage daughter of a drunkard ,making her way by confecting dolls’ bonnets in Limehouse poverty with Eliza. She embodies a pitiless adolescent feminism, her one-line retorts bringing more than one snort of unexpected laughter. Other good laughs are provided by Scott Karim , barnstormingly nasty as prim Bradley Headstone, the savage rote-learning schoolteacher who certainly deserves to end up in the river.
The quintessential Dickens lines Power picks up or adapts are always choice ones, like the policeman explaining that it’s hardest to find murderers because “Burgling, and pocket picking, wants apprenticeship. Murder, any of us could do”. Or bumbling Noddy Boffin, proud to have his “shirts made by a an who goes on holiday with the Prime Minister”, and advising Bella not to write off John as a lover since “When Mrs Boffin met me she thought me an utter vegetable, (but) she’s grown to tolerate me”.
The pleasure is like reading a long novel, flowing alongside and immersing yourself in the brawling, hoping, tragicomic business of small significant lives both middling and harsh. You live with them in a London of intermingled fortunes and feelings. To build those three hours of escape and empathy PJ Harvey’s music plays a vital part. The singing is simple and unadorned, every song natural to the moment, expressing its truth. Harvey’s tunes are struggles and yearnings, long mournful notes and falling triplets. They have all the atmospheric power of a river buoy’s whistle and clang on a foggy night. Loved the journey.
nationatheatre.org.uk. to 22 June
Rating four.
theatreCat 