“Bring Back the Mice”

For Hypocrite Reader’s Horror and Comedy issue, I talk about last year’s re-vamp of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Woman in White” musical, the sensation novel, ‘updating’ Victorian texts, the gothic and crap feminism.

You can read the piece here.

Here’s a bit that didn’t fit into the review, but which I found interesting:

The original West End production took some flack for its projection-sets, which some critics thought looked like a cheap special effect, and a wonky turntable effect. A contemporary American theatre could have pulled the revolve off smoothly enough, American theatre always being blessed with more money than anything else worth having. Nunn himself had previously used a turntable to great effect in his production of Les Miz (https://www.indyweek.com/arts/archives/2012/02/19/when-the-spinning-stopped-les-miserables-25th-anniversary-at-progress-energy-center). But British theatres are often forced to rely more on motor and truck automation; winched systems [http://www.theatrecrafts.com/pages/home/topics/automation-scenic/glossary/]. Sophisticated turntables were largely out of the technical and financial reach of West End productions (indeed, touring Les Miz productions had to drop theirs, and the West End Les Miz itself gave it up in a ‘modernisation’/scaling back), which are of course working with generally older theatres (where the sheer weightof a really good turn table becomes an issue) until this year’s Hamilton production, which relies very heavily on that effect, necessitated a thorough, expensive and time-consuming revamp of Victoria Palace. And god knows when Hamilton will vacate and let someone else have a crack at it. This smaller production chose to address the difficulty of dramatically re-staging the piece by pretty much abandoning ‘design’ as a concept, going incognito as a cheaper, Fringier production than this actually was (the original was staged in 2004–these rights aren’t cheap). Everything looked a bit am-dram naturalism.

 

David Copperfield, 1913 Silent Film (review)

David Copperfield (1913 film) British, Kenneth Ware, 3 Davids (child, youth, adult), silent, a contender for the title of first British feature film, black and white

See here for a full listing of adaptations.

***

Notable Because

This is the fourth film adaptation of DC we know of. I am not altogether certain of this: I lack access to Bolton’s archives, for example. But as far as I can tell, that is the case, and thus the 1913 DC is the earliest adaptation from which footage survives. What luck, then, that we have about half of it! An hour and four minutes, out of an original runtime of over two hours. One wonders how, actually. The BFI’s synopsis is useful in several other respects (that run-time figure, for example, and it also hosts some clips), but doesn’t give the history of their holding.

The 1913 DC is either the first or second British attempt at filming the novel, and the film also has a serious claim to being the first British feature-length film. In that respect alone it’s deeply significant to British film history, and of course it’s very interesting that people rushed to undertake Dickens’ material and this particular novel so early, when the book poses several challenges to adaptation. Perhaps there’s an answer as to why in these productions’ very earliness: it may have been too soon for the makers to have a sense (whether conventional wisdom on this subject is true or not) of the limitations of their medium.

This is possibly the only surviving silent film treatment of the book (I’ve yet to find the ‘22 and ‘24, but then I don’t really know where to look). The BFI draws attention to director Bentley’s other Dickensian work, which does significantly contextualise this production:

“The choice of subject was a natural one for Bentley, who had made something of a career as a Dickensian character actor before turning his hand to directing. It was this that had drawn him to the attention of producer Cecil Hepworth, also an ardent Dickens fan. But the subject was also strategically useful – and of a kind with other early feature films – in being based on a well-known, tried-and-trusted source. Given the extra investment required from producers and exhibitors to make these long films, a ‘prestige’ subject with built-in audience appeal was desirable.”

Built-in audience familiarity and appeal, I’ll give them, but I’m slightly wary of describing Dickens as a ‘prestige’ subject at this stage. I’m not altogether certain this isn’t a back-reading of a cultural position that actually took significant time and labour to establish. ‘Dickens’ was, by the 1910s, both a network of associations and memes very active in popular consciousness and somewhat in intellectual disrepute, if we’re to believe Chesterton about the ascendency of Wilde’s deeply hostile reading. It’s my impression that the generality of people considering Dickens literary, an appropriate subject of study and pillar of the ‘national canon’, came rather later, crucially after enough time had passed to enable people to re-envision the actual man as middle class, pastless and apolitical. The posthumous closure of his surviving publishing and political endeavours may have been necessary to his re-appraisal.

At the end of this review I will include a large number of pictures I took of this film. They are crude phone affairs, but as I’m not sure whether this information is readily available to international scholars in any other form, and as I really don’t think any legal issues can possibly still exist, I offer them.

 

Availability

This film, or what’s left of it, is available for free at all BFI Mediatheques. I believe you can also purchase some kind of online membership from the BFI and thus view it elsewhere.

 

Major Changes from Book

The most phatic possible thing to say is that this film is ‘much shorter’ than the book. And yet the film does feel abridged. Perhaps this is because it covers so many of the book’s plot points in a contracted fashion, then really slows down to give us some scenes in full. Some, though not all, of this queer pacing can be attributed to the loss of half of the original footage. Strangely, given this severe editing, the cuts aren’t obvious. The story holds together: given my unfamiliarity with films from this era, I attributed any little inconsistencies to silent film’s conventions. I didn’t even realise this wasn’t the full film until I turned to write this summary. I do think it’s editing at work. Someone must have made this version to run at this length. It holds together too well to be anything but a cut. Possibly the BFI did this, in order to present the film as a complete and approachable artefact. Yet given the unedited condition of the Mediatheque’s ‘66 DC episode 3, I really can’t imagine them doing so (and if they did, they really ought to have said as much!).

Thus I’m not certain whether, in the original cut, we would have seen David interacting with Steerforth as a schoolboy (he may have been in the classroom scene, undeclared, but the film didn’t call attention to this in any fashion). In the version I saw, David accidentally re-meets Steerforth as a young man in a pub when they’re forced to share a bench and David recognises him. This is our introduction to the character. Upon returning from Yarmouth, David “immediately falls foul of Mr Murdstone, who sends him away from his mother to school”. It seems likely that this was the case even before any cuts were made, because this text comes from an intertitle. I suppose people could have added new intertitles while making cuts–I’m not sure whether this was a common practice. Either way, in the version I saw (and very possibly also in the original version), Dickens’ rather delicate depiction of Murdstone’s gendered emotional abuse has become an energetic and colourful Incident.

David’s coming to live with Betsey takes quite a different shape in this version as well. A title card tells us that “[a]fter many happy years spent with my Aunt at Dover, I am sent to Mr Wickfield, at Canterbury, to finish my education.” The nature of this education is necessarily vague, as is much about David’s move to London. Presumably the director wanted to establish a relationship between David and Betsey, and without description to do so, instead gave them time. What the text could describe quite easily, the film must enunciate to make believable. This way of breaking up the story also gives the film a chance to shift from a child David to an adolescent David, and to give its three David actors each a fair amount of time. Because David comes to Canterbury as an adolescent, he can’t know Agnes and Uriah when he’s young. The nature of their interactions thus shifts considerably. Coming so belatedly, David also can’t associate with the Strongs–and not having to include their arc is perhaps another purpose served by skipping his school days. Dickens himself ‘montages’ over some of David’s youth, but not before establishing Canterbury and the relationships associated with that period very firmly.

The film leaves us alone with Agnes and Uriah, as we never were in the book. Uriah’s canonically mercenary pursuit of Agnes here becomes quite lusty, in a Snidely Whiplash fashion. Steady Agnes becomes the sort of woman who’d slap him. It’s interesting that this reworking of the novel’s Sedgewickian erotic triangulation assigns Agnes David’s aggressive physical defense. David is shown to be aggressive in this adaptation at another point, so it’s not done to spare him that, or to negate the text’s violence by assigning it to a more sympathetic perpetrator.

Perhaps the most remarkable alteration is this film’s decision to–fairly strongly, I think–characterise Uriah via the visual conventions of anti-Semitic stereotype. His omnipresent white neck-cloth becomes a tallit, with the fringe sticking out at the bottom of his waistcoat. Of course this red-headed, mercenary, anti-social invader in the bosom of the bourgeoisie has long attracted some anti-Semitic associations (Dr Katz reminded me of a relevant article, “‘red-headed animal’: Race, Sexuality and Dickens’s Uriah Heep”), but to actually film that reading and literalise those connotations is as odd a project as the 1921 Astra Nielsen female-Hamlet. Perhaps the very earliness of this project enables what I think of as the sort of out-there take one arrives at when there are already many standard versions. Or perhaps this is simply visual language initially derived from anti-Semitic tropes, which has now come to be rather freer-floating, serving as a disassociated signifier of conniving evil. In terms of physicality, this production stages Uriah something like the vampire in Nosfertau. Is this derived from stage conventions, I wonder?

The overriding impression one gets (and I suspect this has a lot to do with pacing) is of a version of DC that eschews the text’s Proustian affects and arrives at melodrama. I don’t mean that in an entirely negative sense. This plot is, however, undeniably simplified. Uriah’s slow, spidery scheme becomes “Uriah steals the deeds belonging to Betsey Trotwood on which she had hoped to raise money.” These financial bawlderisations, like this Uriah’s pantomime-villain postures, undermine the threat Uriah poses and to confuse the nature of that threat. I’ve not seen such a bald rendering of Uriah’s misappropriations since the Dancy Hallmark adaptation’s ‘jewel theft’. The intertitles can have a slightly childish tone, and the source text’s coincidences are rendered bluntly. Uriah and David meet Micawber while walking in the street. The difference between this versions of events and the text’s isn’t very great, but you can see how Micawber’s pausing and double-taking when David is sitting in a house with a large window to the main street for a few hours is that slight bit more natural. The difference between melodrama and novelistic registers derives from just such nuances and small degrees of temporal slack.

When this film shows something that the book, due to being grounded in David’s POV, can’t, it largely does so to emphasize its chosen themes and to ensure audiences’ comprehension–to shore up the limited exposition its intertitles can offer. We see much more of Steerforth and Emily’s courtship, and we also see their actual flight. We see an officer deciding to track a desperate, incoherent Emily, and we see Rosa confronting her before David arrives. Emily is played like Mad Ophelia here.

Per the BFI analysis, “[t]he relatively small number of intertitles shows that some knowledge of the story was assumed (although missing material in the BFI National Archive’s print does create some confusion).” It makes you consider what each production’s audience knew about this text beforehand, and the degree to which all of them rely on received ideas of this story, the Dickensian and Victoriana. At what point do adaptations of DC stop assuming audiences know the book? At what point do they come to rely on the general audience’s primary knowledge of Dickens coming to them via adaptations? One must also consider the degree to which this knowledge, at various points, consisted of generalities, which are often lazy and serve the interests of cultural hegemonies, versus specific knowledge of these characters, incidents and plots.

Major Differences From and Commonalities With Other Adaptations

I’m quite unclear on how popular this adaptation was, and whether large audiences and/or the people making successive adaptations would have heard about or seen it. The point at which you can start expecting modern film-makers  to have access to earlier adaptations is also unclear to me. Would you say the 80s, with VHS? Did BBC insiders making an adaptation even have access to previous BBC serials? How often were things like this re-screened, or television serials re-run? The Hollywood film must have had a market penetration and thus an influence unrivaled by other adaptations for years.

The film’s youngish, pretty Betsey is rather surprising. For all she intimidated young Clara, though she’s his aunt Betsey could very well be almost of an age with David Senior, and thus only in her late 40s when David comes to live with her. She’s usually played older by later adaptations, and costumed, styled etc. more like Judi Dench’s character in Cranford than like Gillian Anderson’s in Bleak House.

As I said of this production in my review of the ‘66, “[t]he ways the silent film forces the creative team to pay close attention to the text are interesting, and I believe they parallel the Italian production’s efforts to do the work to reimagine the text for an audience that they don’t presume in some sense ‘already knows’ the writer, period, and to some extent the story.” This production goes for Chaplinesque physical comedy. It includes the book’s waiter scene, which no other production does. We also spend a lot of time with David alone, on long roads and against vast architecture and natural landscapes. In the absence of words, the child’s smallness and vulnerability evoke considerable pathos. We also see David being told his mother’s died, and the scene dwells on his reactions. And as I said, the film gives more time to Steerforth and Emily, probably at least in part so that plot details the film considers crucial are very clear. The logic of this decision could be analogous to that behind David’s spending ‘happy years’ with Betsey.

The BFI write-up speaks of the use of ‘real book settings’ as the director’s gimmick, but those settings do a ton of work for this production. You can also see the deep appeal of shooting the ‘real places’ from a book. This film offers a literary tourism appeal none of the others can, seeking to help you understand and connect with the text. Other adaptations aren’t interested in mediating and deepening that relationship. They are films in  their own right; this is a dramatisation of the book. No other DC does as much with physical culture as this one.

No other DC I’ve seen uses three Davids, either (child, adolescent and young man). There are almost always two, just as I’ve only ever seen one Uriah (and very often, one rather than two Steerforths). It’s quite surprising to see this actively brawling young David pitching back against the cruel boys he works with at the factory, even if it’s cognisant with the text. This is the David who’d pick fights with the insulting butcher’s boy out of pride, the one who still has a trace of Nicholas Nickleby about him. Yet most productions want to flatten David’s period of poverty into one of abjection, to make him more of a one-note victim.

 

Focuses, and the Production’s Points of Anxiety

The production’s medium affects its focuses in very decided ways. If this is in some sense intended as a ‘visualisation’ of the novel rather than an independent dramatic product, we can see the appeal of its very representational strategy, which is interested in hitting the book’s beats and staging a variety of tableaux. The production makes a startlingly ambitious attempt to cover a ton of plot elements, perhaps more than any other adaptation. In so doing, and because of other questions of register, it sacrifices depth and becomes a pictorial, and again, at times melodramatic treatment of the material. Again, this may be the cuts talking. For me, the film works best where it takes its time. I’ll discuss this point more in the following Material Culture section, but I don’t recall another DC to which settings and props are so important.

The age of the production also shows through in its plotting. Like some early play versions, the 1913 film is more concerned with Little Emily than almost anything else (Dickens Day 2018 will feature a paper on the early importance of this narrative element to theatrical stagings, if you care to learn more). Dr Katz reminded me that when Dickens himself adapted DC for readings, he pulled out the parallel stories of David-Dora and Steerforth-Emily: two love arcs, one tragic and one comic. This decision could have guided theatrical treatments. Due to this focus, the 1913 production stages more desire between Emily and Steerforth in order to support its seduction arc. It also performs a similar intensification and simplification on Uriah and Agnes’s relationship.

To me, focusing overmuch on Emily feels almost like ‘misunderstanding’  the text. But I wonder how much our understanding of, for example, the ‘core’ of Shakespeare plays has shifted with time? I’ve started to think about how differently period drama is staged than Shakespeare, in terms of what a production is conceived of as doing and what a staging is conceived of as drawing out of a text. That’s work I’ve almost never seen a period drama consciously do? What does a given DC have to say to the original, to our relationship with that text, and to the world?

In terms of my thesis-related research concern, this production generates charm largely via its humour. There’s not much nuance to the romance, and while the material culture elements are very strong they’re not in themselves staged with the fascination of, say, Howl’s titular moving castle. They don’t generate charm via their specificity. The adaptations other key source of charm is perhaps the Davids: a handsome young man with silent film’s hypermobile and dramatic expressiveness, and before that, a winning chubby-cheeked child, at turns poignantly alone in the world, indignant and bemused.

 

Settings and Material Culture

In so many ways, this production benefits from its temporal proximity to the source text. I had no idea what a Dickensian stage coach would have looked like (the huge size surprised me), much less what the process of loading and unloading it might have involved. The look of the Peggotys’ boat house, the cork life-vests, the whole process of the shipwreck rescue operation and the information-loaded clothing all derive, I feel, from people involved in the production having any embodied memory of what these things looked like, and how the patterns of work involving them went. My interest isn’t merely academic: these processes added a really unaccustomed richness and unfamiliarity to the familiar visual language of what we now think the Victorian era was like. I wasn’t watching with an eye to this, but Dr Katz suggested one might ask how informed by the original illustrations this production’s visuals were. My sense is that the production might not actually be calling back to that work, because Edwardian audiences often considered the original illustrations coarse and cut or replaced them, not seeing them as part of the coherent artifact of the text.

A silent movie relies a great deal on actors’ movement, but it relies perhaps equally on environments. These do so much work here. As I said in the my review of the ‘66, the “1913 does a better job [than the ‘66 of] showing the Micawber’s waning fortunes via having the environment change as they pawn their belongings.” The Wickfield house perhaps too grand in some respects, but overall the houses are all distinct, and all ‘speak’. I think settings in this film do more than they do in most modern movies. The 1913’s settings not only generate striking tableaux, they also do a great deal to generate mood.

Further Research

The BFI has been very bad about citing its sources. (That’s rich for me to say, but this has been an unpaid blog post, so you know what you’re getting.) To find out more, I might start by contacting the BFI or the person who wrote their analysis of this production, Bryony Dixon, to find out how she came by her information. One might also try looking up this director and producer, and also coming at it via the angle of early British film history.

inexplicable Star of David in Mr Mell’s classroom

headmaster intrudes on Mr Mell’s classroom; young David in first seat

Stagecoach

Waiter Scene

Waiter Scene

Waiter Scene

Waiter Scene

Waiter Scene

Mr Murdstone

Mr Murdstone

David at Wine Bottling Factory

David at Wine Bottling Factory

David at Wine Bottling Factory

Micawbers

Micawbers

Micawbers

Micawbers

Micawbers

Micawbers in Depressed Circumstances

Micawbers in Depressed Circumstances

David Walking to Betsey

David Walking to Betsey

David Walking to Betsey

David Walking to Betsey

Betsey in Garden

Betsey in Garden

Betsey Tends to David

Betsey Tends to David

Betsey & David

Riding Into Canterbury

Mr Wickfield

Adolescent David, Betsey and Mr Wickfield

Adolescent David, Betsey and Mr Wickfield

David and Uriah

David and Uriah

Uriah Gurning

Uriah Scheming

Uriah Scheming

Uriah Scheming

Uriah Scheming

Uriah Scheming

Agnes Spurning Uriah’s Advances

Agnes Spurning Uriah’s Advances

Agnes Spurning Uriah’s Advances

Agnes Spurning Uriah’s Advances

Agnes Spurning Uriah’s Advances

Mister Micawber, Uriah and David meet in the street

Mister Micawber, Uriah and David meet in the street

Mister Micawber, Uriah and David meet in the street

David Meets Steerforth at a Pub

David Meets Steerforth at a Pub

David Meets Steerforth at a Pub

Steerforth Takes David Home To Meet His Mother and Rosa

Steerforth Takes David Home To Meet His Mother and Rosa

Emily and Ham’s Engagement

Emily and Ham’s Engagement

Emily and Steerforth Meet

Emily and Steerforth Meet

Steerforth Seduces Emily

Steerforth Seduces Emily

Steerforth Seduces Emily

Emily’s Letter

Steerforth Runs Away with Emily

Uriah, Betsey, Agnes, Mr Wickfield, David?

Uriah’s Scheme

Micawber Plots Against Uriah

Micawber Plots Against Uriah

Micawber Plots Against Uriah

Micawber Plots Against Uriah

Micawber Plots Against Uriah

Mr Wickfield

Mr Wickfield

Wickfield House

David Courts Dora

David Courts Dora

David Courts Dora

David Courts Dora

Mr Peggotty visits Mrs Steerforth and Rosa with David

Explosion

Explosion

Explosion

Explosion

Dora’s Death

Dora’s Death

Dora’s Death

Dora’s Death

Dora’s Death

Dora’s Death

Dora’s Death

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Emily In Distress

Policeman Comes to Steerforth’s House re Emily

Rosa Confronts Emily

David Sees Rosa On The March

David Sees Rosa On The March

David Sees Rosa On The March

Rosa Confronts Emily

Rosa Confronts Emily

Rosa Confronts Emily

Rosa Confronts Emily

Rosa Confronts Emily

David Arrives to Comfort Emily

David Arrives to Comfort Emily

David Arrives to Comfort Emily

Ham Goes to Rescue Mariner in Danger

Shipwreck

Shipwreck

Shipwreck

Shipwreck

Shipwreck

Shipwreck

Recovery of Bodies

Recovery of Bodies

Recovery of Bodies

Recovery of Bodies

Recovery of Bodies

Recovery of Bodies

Recovery of Bodies

 

Some shots from a funny short film the BFI had on Dickens’ London, which for some reason had several characters riding the bus together in probably the most ambitious crossover event of all time.

David Copperfield, 1966 BBC series with Ian McKellen (review)

David Copperfield (1966 tv miniseries) British, Ian McKellen, BBC (second BBC miniseries), black and white

See here for a full listing of adaptations.

***

Notable Because

This was the fifth tv serial treatment of the novel, and the second BBC adaptation. I believe it to be the earliest BBC adaptation we have surviving footage from. It features a very early performance from Ian McKellen as David and a campy cameo from Patrick Troughton, who plays a pawnbroker.

***

Availability

The BFI holds episodes 3, 8, 9 and 11. Episode three is available for free and without appointment at BFI Mediatheque suites around the UK. This is a curious copy, with multiple takes (and actor eyerolls when these are requested of them). At one point director Joan Craft can be heard–not exactly impolitely, but shortly–telling everyone to shut up.

The last three surviving episodes can only be found at the BFI archives in London. One must make an appointment, and there is a small fee (about £20 total when we visited, though this rate may well prove ephemeral). These are screening copies, without the third episode’s production ephemera (so better or worse, depending on what you’re watching for). The technician who set us up was a friendly man who almost encouraged us to bring in drinks and the like, so long as we were reasonably careful. He was very surprised there were only these few scattered episodes left. Apparently the BBC’s carelessness towards posterity is only legendary in Doctor Who circles.

***

Major Changes from Book

This adaptation is perhaps unusually interested in what it means to make a filmic version of David Copperfield. It’s particularly invested in portraying things the book cannot show you, both due to the restrictions contingent on David’s narration and those that arise from Victorian narrative conventions. If you have to trade away Dickens’ prose and the charms and insights derived from David’s interiority in order to film DC, the ‘66 recognises this as a loss and attempts to recoup something by showing scenes David could not have been privy to, or could not have related in quite this manner.

This allows you to look at David, who is handsome in this version in a way Dickens only very obliquely suggests in the text, and who’s also amusing. Reading the book attentively, putting in that work, allows you to enjoy David at a remove from his first person narration in a similar fashion. Indeed I’d argue that David himself is one of the book’s key sources of pleasure: he lives a charmed life, and is crafted to charm you by a man desperate to do so. But it’s interesting that roughly contemporaneously with this adaptation, a major essay suggesting that David was quite a good character in his own right rocked Dickensian literary studies. Duh? And yet it was considered quite a claim. Sometimes I think immediate Dickensian reception was fairly sound, as in they could fucking read the texts with basic aptitude, and then there was a generation or two where, in a sort of Bloomian rebellion against a literary pater familias, with perhaps five exceptions (Freud, Woolf, Eliot, Chesterton and Peake, and even those vary in degree, with Freud and Woolf at least feeling obliged to be a bit ashamed of liking him as much as they do), people got immensely stupid about him.

The filmic gaze thus easily accesses something that apparently eluded many contemporary readers. Rather than playing a straight man, in this version David is as funny as most of the other characters, wailing that he ‘is the destroyer!!’ who’s killed Dora when she swoons during the (here-staged) proposal scene (this is from a later scene in the book*). We also see their wedding–my guess is that filmic convention seemed to demand it.

We also see Agnes’ longing glances when David’s back is turned: a vision of female desire that David, and perhaps Dickens, were unwilling to look too directly at. (One hesitates to attribute this unusual degree of embodiment for Agnes to this production’s female director–it seems over-simplistic, and possibly even like a reductive way of discussing Craft’s contribution. And yet…) But it’d be unjust to attribute an endemic Victorian inability to reckon with the moral, intelligent, desiring female to Dickens specifically. In general, this production is willing to stage and invested in showing all kinds of things a Victorian novel wouldn’t have shared with a reading public: sometimes even things that the people who comprise the series’ small social gatherings, had they been real, would never have spoken of even among themselves.

We see Dora and a doctor discuss her pregnancy. The Wickfields, Heeps and David discuss David’s coming child. Uriah offers his toast to Agnes directly after they’ve drunk Mrs Copperfield and child–a sequence of events that seems to link David’s acquisition of family (and associated material success) with Uriah’s envious acquisitiveness. We see more of Dora’s birthing drama, and Betsey makes direct allusions between this scene and David’s own birth. David is in the room directly after Dora’s stillbirth, touching and comforting her.

Of course Dickens only told us Scrooge’s niece by marriage was pregnant in Christmas Carol by saying she was a little out of breath and having her illustrated so as to hide her stomach. Such was the Victorian taboo against discussion of pregnancy that this absence signified. Of course David would have shanked himself before telling Uriah Heep that his wife (which she wasn’t, when that dinner table conversation happened in the book) was expecting, but this aspect of Victoriana doesn’t really interest this adaptation team.

The timeline of the proposal, and of David and Dora’s subsequent marital upsets, is a little addled here, as is the manuscript publishing timeline. David writes a full novel out before anything else, and this novel is accepted by a published during his engagement–in fact in this adaptation, this sale enables him to marry. He’s no longer working for Dora’s father, who consequently need not die, but rather simply a Mr Spenlow.

***

Major Differences From/Commonalities With Other Adaptations

Director Joan Craft helmed both this production and the BBC’s subsequent 1974 DC, as well as many, many other Dickens adaptations. This thorough little write-up gives some context in that regard, and also provides a few clips. There are so many commonalities between these that we might almost consider the ‘74 a revival of the same production, this time in colour (besides, the BBC may well have already gotten rid of the bulk of the ‘66’s episodes by 1974). This fits neatly with something I’ve long thought: that up until perhaps the 90s in some cases, the primary analogue for BBC production was live theatre rather than film, radio shows, comics, etc. You can tell from the camera angles, for example: the last episode of Blake’s 7 not only works like a Greek tragedy, that shooting gallery set is a stage. The BBC has always expected its audiences to be trained on and familiar with the conventions of live theatre, in a way American television (with its audiences’ comparatively impoverished access to a developed theatre culture) never did. It still engages in such training: look at CBBC’s Shakespeare plays, which not only introduce the material but are deeply invested in teaching small children how plays work.

The ‘74 DC feels like a theatrical restaging of a production because in many ways, it is exactly that. The casting choices (rather ill-defined features for Uriah, for example, which his thinness might well have suggested sharpness) and script decisions are particularly well-preserved, which is especially striking considering how few other adaptations take these lines. Script writer Vincent Tilsley also worked on The Prisoner, and “[g]ave up writing for television, and became a psychotherapist, when his six-hour drama ITV Sunday Night Theatre: The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973) was cut down to less than 2 hours.” Per this write-up, Tilsley is already revising his ’56 script here. The 1974 script is by Hugh Whitemore. I’m honestly surprised they wrote a whole new script for that, given how akin the final products are, and wonder about the extent to which they edited the ‘66 version versus attempted to recreate their last two attempts without:

1. script drafts, which the BBC is not in the habit of saving for some god-forsaken reason,
2. easy-to-view previous editions, or
3. Tilsley’s being active and willing to play ball.

Is the ‘74 production in some ways an attempt to remember the ‘66? Rosa makes a violent vow concerning Emily to David in both, and David and Mr Dick have an almost-verbatim-from-the-book chat about Betsey in both as well.

‘What do you consider me, sir?’ asked Mr. Dick, folding his arms.
‘A dear old friend,’ said I. ‘Thank you, Trotwood,’ returned Mr. Dick, laughing, and reaching across in high glee to shake hands with me. ‘But I mean, boy,’ resuming his gravity, ‘what do you consider me in this respect?’ touching his forehead.
I was puzzled how to answer, but he helped me with a word.
‘Weak?’ said Mr. Dick.
‘Well,’ I replied, dubiously. ‘Rather so.’

etc.

Uriah hadn’t arrived in the plot by episode three, and was absent from it in eight and nine. Thus we only really get a sense of what the ‘66 is doing with him from episode eleven–not much to go on, unfortunately. This version suggests Micawber’s complicity in keeping mum about Heep’s business more than others. David is outright alarmed by Micawber’s working for Uriah. This Mrs Heep is as cringing as her son, whereas for example the Dancy 2000 staging chooses to make her bemused and dimmer than Uriah. In the 2000 DC, Mrs Heep is venal (lusting after Uriah’s horde of ‘stolen jewels’), but no longer possibly involved in the intricacies of and an active participant in Uriah’s scheming. The book, of course, leaves room for her being entirely aware of and engaged in her son’s stratagems.

As the previous section implied, with David’s coming child being toasted in the scene where Uriah ‘plucks a pear before it’s ripe’, this adaptation collapses several conversation between the two. This is not altogether unusual–most adaptations try to cram the slap in without staging Strong, or avoid the discussion over coffee that ends in David contemplating homicide with a fire poker while retaining Uriah’s sinister, mocking hints that he’s tilting at Agnes. However the ‘66 is rather special in that it attempts to retain the foundation school conversation, which to my thinking is Uriah’s key ‘villain speech’, an almost Shakespearean monologue about motivation that underscores the political and class dimensions of the novel’s key antagonism. Most adaptations get rid of this because they don’t think it worth working to preserve. They’re ultimately not interested in Dickens as a complex or political writer. This feeds into a popular conception of him as schmaltzy, which even adaptors often indulge in as though they weren’t themselves perhaps its chief architects.

This staging doesn’t do fabulously by the foundation school conversation. It cramming a few lines from that intense, intimate rant into a moment where Uriah is attempting to do something different–to taunt, rather than to reach out for a vicious kind of empathy. But at least it’s there, in some form? That’s more than I can say for so many adaptations? We also get, in perhaps another such collapsing, Uriah touching David here in a way he does more markedly in other scenes. Most adaptations forgo this aspect of their interaction, even though it is canon, probably because the gestural language of the Victorians reads as too effeminate to cinematic audiences. Honestly I expect the relative earliness of this adaptation is responsible for what we get of it here (I’ve written elsewhere on the creeping cinematic advance of the Not Gays, starting from perhaps the late 80s).

This production (and the ‘74) is unusually focused on Dora’s incapacity for Victorian lower-middle-class marriage and David’s reactions to proofs of this. Dora lisps here, saying w for r (again, a neat choice derived from the act of filming DC). Betsey explicitly compares her to Clara. Lines from Hamlet crop up in David’s proposal, and again when he reads to Dora to ‘improve her mind’. Dora and David reach more of a resolution on these points in this version than in many others (perhaps a necessary corollary to their being unusually dwelt on). I think most filmings avoid this arc because if done in part rather than in full, it can come off as unduly nasty to both husband and wife, or require too stark a choice as to who your sympathy ought to belong to.

Some scattered notes: episode three shows us more of the road journey than most other depictions. Because we lack all the episodes, it’s very difficult to determine whether the ‘66 maintains any of the Strongs’ plot. We actually see Spenlow’s ‘hidden partner’, Jorking.

***

Focuses/The Production’s Points of Anxiety

Dr Katz and I were rather hoping that McKellen’s performance as David would be definitive. While it was pleasant, and while the production enabled David to be more of character here than he’s often allowed to be, we weren’t captivated. ‘Captivated’ is precisely what a good David ought to leave you. People’s strong affective responses to Dickens as a person (which did change considerably as he aged and grew more prominent) could be a very good guide as to what you’re going for. Ultimately we’re left without a quintessential rendition of the part, and instead with proof that a great many fine actors have come into fully their talent with age, experience and the presence these can lend them (aspects of craft that female actors are so seldom given comparable opportunities to develop and display).

Work and Class

In addition to putting emphasis on David, the ‘66 is particularly interested in David’s work. This gives an unusual depth to his airy fate to ‘be a writer’ (a business that, for Dickens himself, was anything but the stuff of Romantic contemplative retreat). Nor is David alone in labour. Agnes can make pie, and does. (Why, they’re twinned, fated–) Alone together, Agnes She and Dora talk about the work of running a house.

Now, would Agnes be able to make pie, or choose to do it? The Wickfields surely must have had servants. Agnes explicitly has a governess. The text doesn’t say more about this woman than that she exists, or mention any of her co-workers. Dickens conspicuously removes service from this fictionalised autobiography at the point in his own life when his family was closer to being in it than relying on even its most rudimentary forms (and in urban Victorian Britain, service broadly-considered wasn’t a luxury so much as fundamental to even working class life–with a narrow band of exceptionality, essentially you served or were served).

And of course, the Dickens family was in service. Charles’ grandmother, living during his childhood, was a housekeeper who married another member of the staff of a great house. She’s possibly the model for Mrs Runcible in Bleak House: certainly the offspring of a housekeeper ending up rootless or making incredibly good according to their character and arbitrary fate can’t help being a commentary on his own family. Perhaps the most important self-refashioning in Copperfield is Dickens’ reimagining himself and, without outright lying, suggesting to the world that he was, despite his Cockney accent and chav mannerisms, what his readers imagined him to be: reared middle-class.

Service in the novel signifies. Peggotty is integrated into the household, David considers her being relegated to ‘service’ spheres of the house and then banished a betrayal of her and a violation of his family. Clara Copperfield has a murky, under-elaborated past as a nursery-governess who married well and rose. Then we have a long period without service, with strangely few examples thereof. Betsey’s maid-companion Janet occupies an ambiguous sphere. David’s unservicable urban landlady both serves him and is an independent businesswoman with power over him. Service finally re-enters the novel after David’s marriage, in a way that coincides with its re-entry into Dickens’ actual life. CD and DC both started doing better around this time–David’s sudden plunge into poverty re-aligns him with Charles’ experience.

I suspect David buys Dora the infamous cookery book because, even at his most economically vulnerable, he imagines Dora be able to buy sensibly, supervise and possibly help prepare food (rather than, as she suggests, turning the entire enterprise over to others**). Though the Wickfield’s service arrangements are vague (and for that matter, where does Uriah actually live during David’s school years, as opposed to taking his tea?), the canonical Agnes is probably not in the habit of regularly cooking. The ‘66 chooses to have Mr Wickfield’s ‘little housekeeper’ make pie as a sort of synecdoche for her managerial competence. It wants to preserve ‘Agnes as worker’, though the considerable effort involved in running a home is more difficult to convey, and less sympathetic, than home-cooking.

When servants re-enter this adaptation, it heavily plays up the farce, using David’s absence from some scenes to show us the servants’ unvarnished exchanges. It dwells more on the servants’ drama more than the book does, wich is quite something given that they’re adapting such a substantive text. The low comedy interval gives David a chance to be comical himself, but this adaptation’s Betsey also says quite frankly that David ought to put the servants in their place.

Despite what Dr Katz feels is a dimmer than usual Micawber, who couldn’t wind up a judge, this production’s Micawbers make an real effort to recognise David as a child. In fact, I think a lot of productions have a go at this. Micawber’s treating David like a small adult is somehow too uncomfortable for modern stagings, and David’s youthful competence won’t quite do either. Here Mrs Micawber suggests that David go to Betsey, rather than the scheme being his own. They discuss and explicitly nix David’s going to Peggotty in this production: a possibility this version of the narrative is conscious of and anxious to foreclose. We also see Betsey and Peggotty explicitly arriving at their housekeeping arrangement, an aspect of the endgame most productions let slip, either because the idea of Peggotty’s returning to service strikes the makers as uncomfortable or because the resolution of her arc and Betsey’s isn’t particularly important to them. The ‘66 further draws a stark contrast between Steerforth’s mother’s desire to exact concessions in exchange for her son’s forgiveness, which runs somewhat counter to the license society permits men of James’s class, and Mr Peggotty’s yearning to forgive and regain Emily, which likewise contravenes social expectations that a fallen woman’s family will join in judging and punishing her.

Ultimately the ‘66 is very concerned with class, but not in a focused way. It wants not only to do more with class material than other adaptations, but to patch what it sees as holes in the textual narrative. Yet it’s not very good at catching the source text’s key class-predicated arcs, or at establishing its own through-line on these themes. What we have is a great deal of nebulous anxiety-activity, emerging at several stages in the production process, and a seeming lack of conversation and agreement on approach from the principal creatives. The result is lightly reminiscent of Robert Graves’ execrable, obsessive treatment of class in The Real David Copperfield.

Women’s Lib

Betsey’s husband is another key site of anxiety for both this production and the ‘74. I’m forced to attribute this attention to the rise of second-wave feminism. The ‘66 gives us a scene where Betsey is alone with her textually domestically violent former husband. He’s snuck into her home, and signals that she shouldn’t make any noise to alert the others of his unexpected presence. The staging almost enters a Night of the Hunter horror register. In this version Betsey owns up to David’s accusations (and Mr Dick’s, through him) immediately, telling David “it is no fancy” of Mr Dick’s that a man is bothering her.

Betsey heavily uses the third person to describe herself here. This seems at once a piece of repetitious Dickensian verbal characterisation and an act of distancing and dissociation. Psychologically, it strikes a note of uncomfortable truth. Yet the ‘66 and ‘74 are more sympathetic to Betsey’s relationship with her husband and to the man himself than any other adaptations, erasing his violence and turning his irresponsibility and addiction into a tragedy. Betsey’s given a firm cause for not liking boys, as if she needed an elaborate, over-justified and time-limited excuse. Once again, it’s as if the writer and director disagreed with one another as to how to read this relationship (and repeated that fight eight years later, with a second writer!).

***

Settings/Material Culture

The density of objects in the staging’s homes is very Victorian, but the production doesn’t do much financial signalling via these. The houses suffer from the Victorian generalism that defines most modern productions, whereby social and regional distinctions collapse to the degree that Betsey’s house looks rather like the Micawbers’. Alternatively, modern productions can have almost parodic ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ modes, with no allowance for a family’s taste, gradations of means, etc. (Think about how a modern poor Western home doesn’t look like a bare shack–it had a whole array of signifiers and paraphernalia.)

The Christmas tree Dora’s aunts busy themselves with is narrowly period, though a bit on-trend for these old women. The tinsel, I am almost certain, is absolutely impossible (see, for example, the Geffrey Museum’s Christmas displays of festive middle class urban homes). A later production would, I think, be more inclined to either omit this depiction of Christmas or play it up hard, given that as Dickens recedes from the public imaginary and his associative linkages as drain away from so many other things, they pool around Christmas by default.

Everyone drinks wine in this DC, never tea or anything else. The boat-house is, per canon, upside down in the ‘66, as in the 1913. I’m not sure whether this holds in the ‘74. Modern versions tend to lose this detail, as it makes the house look less recognizable as a boat and thus less fantastic. (The more modern you get, the less you can assume an audience knows the details of this text.) The grid-iron cooking scene where Mr Micawber shows his quality is apparently so important that, even though the ‘66 has lost this whole original sequence of events, it’s been repurposed for another dinner.

The 1913 does a better job showing the Micawber’s waning fortunes via having their environment change as they pawn their belongings. The ways the silent film forces the creative team to pay close attention to the text are interesting, and I believe they parallel the Italian production’s efforts to do the work to reimagine DC for an audience that they don’t presume ‘already knows’ the writer, period, and to some extent the story.

***

Further Research

If I do long-form research on versions of DC, or if you want to know more about this lacuna-riddled mini-series, the place to go to find out about this version (and the ‘74) is the BBC Written Archives. You might be able to get scripts, stills, audio recordings and correspondence related to the production by searching both it and the files relating to the principal creatives during the relevant years. The BBC archives have no neat publically accessible listing of their contents: you have to bother a librarian, have her talk you through their holdings, then schlep out there.

***

 

* “‘My own! May I mention something?’
‘Oh, please don’t be practical!’ said Dora, coaxingly. ‘Because it frightens me so!’
‘Sweetheart!’ I returned; ‘there is nothing to alarm you in all this. I want you to think of it quite differently. I want to make it nerve you, and inspire you, Dora!’
‘Oh, but that’s so shocking!’ cried Dora.
‘My love, no. Perseverance and strength of character will enable us to bear much worse things.’ ‘But I haven’t got any strength at all,’ said Dora, shaking her curls. ‘Have I, Jip? Oh, do kiss Jip, and be agreeable!’
It was impossible to resist kissing Jip, when she held him up to me for that purpose, putting her own bright, rosy little mouth into kissing form, as she directed the operation, which she insisted should be performed symmetrically, on the centre of his nose. I did as she bade me—rewarding myself afterwards for my obedience—and she charmed me out of my graver character for I don’t know how long.
‘But, Dora, my beloved!’ said I, at last resuming it; ‘I was going to mention something.’
The judge of the Prerogative Court might have fallen in love with her, to see her fold her little hands and hold them up, begging and praying me not to be dreadful any more.
‘Indeed I am not going to be, my darling!’ I assured her. ‘But, Dora, my love, if you will sometimes think,—not despondingly, you know; far from that!—but if you will sometimes think—just to encourage yourself—that you are engaged to a poor man—’
‘Don’t, don’t! Pray don’t!’ cried Dora. ‘It’s so very dreadful!’
‘My soul, not at all!’ said I, cheerfully. ‘If you will sometimes think of that, and look about now and then at your papa’s housekeeping, and endeavour to acquire a little habit—of accounts, for instance—’
Poor little Dora received this suggestion with something that was half a sob and half a scream.
‘—It would be so useful to us afterwards,’ I went on. ‘And if you would promise me to read a little—a little Cookery Book that I would send you, it would be so excellent for both of us. For our path in life, my Dora,’ said I, warming with the subject, ‘is stony and rugged now, and it rests with us to smooth it. We must fight our way onward. We must be brave. There are obstacles to be met, and we must meet, and crush them!’
I was going on at a great rate, with a clenched hand, and a most enthusiastic countenance; but it was quite unnecessary to proceed. I had said enough. I had done it again. Oh, she was so frightened! Oh, where was Julia Mills! Oh, take her to Julia Mills, and go away, please! So that, in short, I was quite distracted, and raved about the drawing-room.
I thought I had killed her, this time. I sprinkled water on her face. I went down on my knees. I plucked at my hair. I denounced myself as a remorseless brute and a ruthless beast. I implored her forgiveness. I besought her to look up. I ravaged Miss Mills’s work-box for a smelling-bottle, and in my agony of mind applied an ivory needle-case instead, and dropped all the needles over Dora. I shook my fists at Jip, who was as frantic as myself. I did every wild extravagance that could be done, and was a long way beyond the end of my wits when Miss Mills came into the room.
‘Who has done this?’ exclaimed Miss Mills, succouring her friend.
I replied, ‘I, Miss Mills! I have done it! Behold the destroyer!’—or words to that effect—and hid my face from the light, in the sofa cushion.”

** “‘Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?’
My pretty little Dora’s face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss.
‘Would you know how to buy it, my darling?’ I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible.
Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph:
‘Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need I know? Oh, you silly boy!’
So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever.”

Review: Captivate Theatre’s Oliver!

 

“Oliver, never before has a boy—“ no, sorry. I have come to review Captivate Theatre’s Edinburgh Fringe production of Oliver! at the Rose Theatre, not to launch into the big titular number. Hard to resist it, though.

Oliver! does such a good job of adapting Oliver Twist that it begins to seem strange that so many ‘period drama’ adaptations are joyless, homogenous, National Trust-branded awkward nonentities. Oliver!’s formula is, after all, rather simple. The musical understands that the titular character doesn’t need to be particularly compelling or the centre of attention. This is a parish boy’s progress, not a Hero’s Journey. Oliver is the youthful plot impetus rather than the psychological agent his successors David and Pip will be. Oliver! relishes the novel’s dialogue and lifts it where possible. It gets the book’s jokes and tells them well, it makes a meal of Dickens’ big, theatrical characters, and it’s more interested in the themes and mechanical tensions of the story than in re-enacting every element of the plot with slavish fidelity.

Read full article here at the Dickens Society blog.

Foes & Families: Love & Friendship, Lady Susan, and How Jane Austen’s Victorian Family Built a Squeaky-Clean Celebrity Brand

To talk about the 2016 film Love & Friendship we have to tell the story of Lady Susan, the Jane Austen novella it’s based off of. At the time of Austen’s death, this early work was both unpublished and untitled. Thus changing the name for the film seems fair enough, though exchanging Lady Susan for Love & Friendship, already the posthumously-assigned title of an entirely different piece of Austen’s juvenilia is really confusing. The marketing team probably did it to get that familiar ‘Noun & Noun’ Austen Title Formula on the posters. According to Jane’s Fame, Claire Harman’s excellent survey of the history of Austen reception, this was already a noted, copied characteristic of her work in 1821, only four years after her death.

The exact period of Lady Susan’s composition remains a matter of some debate. William Baker’s Critical Companion to Jane Austen: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work proposes drafting dates ranging from between 1795 to 1805, as well as providing an incredibly useful synopsis of major critical readings of the novella. What we can know definitively is that Lady Susan was first published in 1871, when it acquired its current title, by Jane’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, “as an appendix to the second edition of his A Memoir of Jane Austen”. (p. 124)

Read full review here.

 

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 2016 (film review)

I stared at the Facebook message in horror. Had a uni friend truly linked me to the trailer for the (inevitable) film of the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the assumption that I would be pumped about this? Had she, in her sweet innocence, failed to notice that I am a hideous snob put on this earth to roll my eyes at the ‘classic novel and SFnal creature’ book trend? WAS MY BRAND INVISIBLE? Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the last film on earth I would ever be willing to watch.

But as Austen teaches us, no plan survives contact with one’s sisters. Meghan was born ten years after me because god thought that up until then I’d had it too easy. Twenty years later she sat sulking through our low-key Halloween celebrations, and I felt guilty for dragging her prematurely into my fogeyish idea of a hot night (I had a roast dinner and a full-length black mourning veil to lunge out at trick-or-treating children in—what more could be wanting?). She suggested we watch Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and apparently I am slightly more prone to guilt even than to pretentiousness, because I agreed to let that happen in my home.

Read full review here.

Notes on Great Expectations at Wimbledon Library (2016)

* YOU ONLY HAVE UNTIL DECEMBER 18TH TO SEE THIS, and I really recommend you do!

* This production has found Trevor Nunn’s epic Nicholas Nickleby like some people find Jesus, and it’s working pretty well. I love that production, and thus another in that tradition, which has not been built upon as it ought to have been, works great for me. I think both Nunn’s Nickleby and this Great Expectations demonstrate a way of adapting Dickens that’s too often passed over. What we mostly see, in the endless bad adaptations that waste Gillian Anderson et al’s talent and time, is a totalising, slavishly naturalistic ‘period piece’ gaze. This renders not only the texts in question internally homogenous (turning the lovely and varying textures of Dickens into a smooth, unappetising thin paste, like an English person’s inevitably tragic attempt to make soup), but every Dickens book (all of which have their own distinct tones and moods) essentially the same. Worse still, such a gaze renders every ‘period’ piece from Dickens to Downton equally samey. The Hollow Crown is shot like Bleak House is shot like Parade’s End, essentially.

Naturalism is of course far from the only way to represent life, so it’s nice to see this theatrical production making good use of the magic of its particular mode both to achieve a greater sympathy with the hyper-reality of the source text and to produce something much richer than I’m used to getting from filmed adaptations.

* The blending of dialogue and prose from the original allows the text room, refuses to relinquish Dickens’ power and multifaceted appeal.

* The library venue was fun.

* I haven’t actually read this one! I did see a puppet version once, performed with the original Victorian toy theatre from Pollock’s. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a tiny puppet Miss Havisham die in a horrible conflagration: you are not living now.

* The stripped down lighting and blend of (I believe?) recorded and live-voice sound effects was very effective. The physicality and work with small props really show what a company can do with a small space and a limited budget. If I saw this at the Fringe it would probably rank as one of the strongest offerings (and that’s a highly competitive context!). But this staging also relies on the company to be on beat in order to generate its effects, and I felt they could have been a bit stricter about that. Without the huge cast Nunn relied on to create his London (which this show strongly draws on, especially for Pip’s big initial entrance), for example, they people on stage need to be Rockette-disciplined in order for the simultaneous and/or handed-over vocal and physical effects not to look shoddy. Nothing is seriously harmed by the cast’s moments of imprecision, but there were times where they were all supposed to say a word in unison (‘Pip’, for example), and it was a little sloppy. Y’all ain’t singin’ a round here.

Not to denigrate a largely well-executed effect! I like that entry to London, that way of making the city a theatrical character. The waterside scene before the fateful boat trip was particularly well-done.

* I know it’s a pain to stage fight calls, but this show needs to be bolder on physical violence, especially where Pip’s sister is concerned. She always seemed as though she might be half-joking, in this production. If we don’t feel Pip’s distress and lowness, we can’t fully dramatically engage with the poisoned chalice of his elevation. It Pip’s sister isn’t truly awful, we can’t have the huge Dickensian catharsis and forgiveness. This is always a vital element of his work, but it seems especially so at Christmas, given that Dickens’ Christmas stories in Household Words and All The Year Round always stressed redemption and forgiveness. These were key elements of the civic religiosity Dickens painstaking constructed around Christmas from the publication of the Carol up into the very end of his life.

* There’s a lot of quick-change doubling in this production, singled by actors’ bearing, voice and small alterations of costume. This, interestingly, reminds me of the monopolylogues which Dickens absolutely lived for as a young legal clerk, which Simon Callow (in his theatrically-focused Dickens biography) convincingly argues influenced both Dickens’ character-writing and his later readings. The term ‘readings’ makes one think of a sort of thin experience, but Dickens threw himself into the embodiment of his characters in a way that was, by all contemporary accounts, riveting. Someone called him a man possessed, and he sold out American and British theatres on the strength of his performance as much as his literary celebrity.

We had a good Pip (who was never tasked with playing anyone else that I recall) and, via these changes, a great Herbert Pocket and a powerful Jaggers/Magwitch. I wanted Estella to come off fiercer, though, eviscerating in her pride and contempt, and for Havisham to be towering. These are titanic roles, and I feel actresses can be too afraid of taking up the requisite space sufficiently definitively. For all we talk about femininity as a performance and spectacle, I think actresses have to work harder than actors to demand attention—that they risk and do more in giving that to a role and an audience, and that the audience is not necessarily fair to them when they do. Still, this is a piece in part about power, gender and social appearances, and given that thematic content I think it’s especially incumbent on actresses in these roles to screw their courage to the sticking place and go huge. This isn’t Merchant Ivory territory.

* I didn’t notice until now that Pip in GE and David in DC both use almost the same language for Estella ( “Do you admire her?” “Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.”) and Agnes (“She has great admiration for Miss Agnes. And I’m sure you have too, Master Copperfield.” “Everybody must have,” I replied.” / “you said one day that everybody must admire her”). I suppose Dickens did re-read DC directly before writing GE, in order to make sure they weren’t too similar (Sidenote: he cried re-reading DC, which. What a wet sock, bless.), so he might have accidentally picked up his own phrasing. Still, such different women to say the same thing of! And to Miss Havisham and Uriah Heep, both of whom are the protagonists’ hidden enemies, and both of whom ask a leading question to provoke the response. Though nominally, Heep is trying to warn David off and Havisham to lead him on…

* The big conflict scenes (Magwitch’s first appearance, the fire, and the boat-non-escape) could all be crisper and clearer in their action.

* The interval comes when Pip arrives in London, and I felt the second half was superior to the first—the play picked up energy here.

* The arc of this adaptation is neatly curtailed.

* Joe was well-acted, and was the most effective emotional nexus in the piece. At times I thought the source text rather than this play generated and bore the emotion of the work, and I wanted the play to make itself felt more. I’m not sure how I wanted that to happen, but it was like the emotion was in the background, and I wanted it to move to this layer, to the foreground: for the play to own the narrative, at this moment, more than it was doing, to really nail its good intentions.

* The show had good costuming (in a historically vague way, but that wasn’t really the point) except for adult Estella—I liked her cape, but in general the silhouette didn’t work for me. Estella’s costuming is particularly difficult, though, as her outfit is tasked with embodying and helping convey the living display of power Havisham has made her into.

* I really feel they ought to have gone with the iconic ‘no shadow of a second parting’ closer. The current ending feels a little ‘…oh’, and that line is so classic, even if it wasn’t Dickens’ first choice—he was wrong, like Shaw was wrong about “Pygmalion”. It happens. It happens to Dickens kind of a lot.

Paddington (film)

I was so suspicious of Paddington. Not because he is an immigrant. Or because of his terrible record of causing property damage. No, because I took one look at the CGI gloss of the Paddington bus-adverts and thought it must be one of those tedious Shrek-sequel affairs. I expected dated-even-as-they-hit-the-cinemas, faux-daring yet actually milquetoast-safe pop-culture references, an anxious need to tell jokes constantly (like a parent trying show they’re ‘down with the kids’), that said jokes would be of poor quality (same). These movies seem to have an incredible embarrassment about and discomfort with being films for families. “Shouldn’t we be somehow gritty? Lethal Weapon for the under-10s, plus fart jokes?” All that unbearably adolescent 90s comics shite.

Paddington was not that film. Paddington was an excellent film, and I cried and repented and loved it.

Full review here

The Hunger Games (film)

In Panem, a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future North America, twelve Districts must offer up, at random, two young Tributes to compete in the Hunger Games. The televised battle to the death, which only one Tribute can survive, provides a reality television spectacle for the wealthy and powerful citizens of the Capitol. The regular demonstration of force it represents, the resulting constant terror, and their own complicity with the ritual serve to undermine the Districts’ willingness to rebel. Katniss Everdeen, a young woman from the most peripheral and perhaps the poorest District, volunteers in place of her younger sister. In order to survive Katniss must navigate the dangers posed by the Arena and her fellow contestants, as well successfully spin the media narratives that give shape to the Games.

Full review here