A GHOSTLESS DICKENS TREAT FOR CHRISTMAS
This is wonderful: a three-hander adaptation by Abigail Pickard Price, with the Guildford Shakespeare Company. They’re well up to the new-vaudeville style of the 1980’s Reduced Shakespeare, only with better costumes. Three deft, fast-moving actors play everybody, with instant hat-swopping and the hurling on and off of gowns and frock-coats. Surprisingly elaborate ones: I still don’t quite see how Luke Barton’s Peggoty becomes Ham becomes Micawber and becomes Ham again so fast, what with Mr Dick to handle meanwhile. Though Mrs Steerforth’s outfit is so vast it looks as if Barton was able to step into it from behind in a second. Nor do I know for sure – only Louise Beresford can – whether Uriah Heep’s dark clerical trouserings were there all the time under poor doomed Emily’s wafting seablue gowns. When things are really hectic, a character’s brief appearance can be as a hat, and Murdstone is a coathanger, though his jacket’s arm can suddenly throttle David. But the quick-change of personality and gender is, as always, enlivening. And adaptor-director PIckard Price has at her side Amy Lawrence the as movement director: it shows.
But what is particularly fine about this production, what makes it in the end as engrossingly moving as Dickens would wish, is that of the three only one – Eddy Payne – is required to do a wholly sincere, consistently credible emotional performance, while Beresford and Barton dart round him in spurts of brilliant character-acting. Payne grows from the scared, naive, wondering young David to a confident young man, a gentle appreciator of Mr Dick (one of the nicest portrayals of mental incapacity in literature). Then he is lovesick , becoming an affectionate but impatiently struggling husband to the terrible “childwife” Dora, and finally a weary, responsible figure at the heart of the legal-circus-chaos of Micawber and Spenlow and Wickfield and Heep and the ruined Miss Trotwood. I swear that during this latter process, a bravura final quarter of the show, the once-boyish Mr Payne actually grew a grey hair or two.
So his solo David anchors the story – the text is Dickens treated with Ming-vase care – while the drama surges around him. It has the same feel as Ianucci’s brilliant recent film of the book: a whole England flows around it, vivid and perilous and absurd . Barton’s big Micawber speech, delivered over the top and far down the other side, is a great delight. So was remembering bits I had forgotten over the years since reading it: – the demise of Mr Spenlow (startlingly evoked in two seconds, theyre very deft with props) and the existence of old Mrs Steerforth and her confrontation with Emily. Splendid. Memorable. It really ought, given where David Copperfield was born and Peggoty lived, to come to Suffolk and `Norfolk very soon..Meanwhile, just go.
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 20 December.
Then Theatre royal Windsor , then Holy Trinity Church, Guildford
rating 5 (and a costume-design mouse for Neil Irish, because that quick change stuff doesnt come easy….
theatreCat 