REVIEW -- GREAT EXPECTATIONS by CHARLES DICKENS
Adapted by STEWART HOWSON

Performed by NORTHUMBERLAND THEATRE COMPANY

The Grand Theatre, St Leonardgate, Lancaster
Wednesday 15 March 2006

Image courtesy the Northumberland Touring Company and Keith Pattison

Northumberland Theatre Company, in choosing Stewart Howson to adapt Charles Dickens' late epic Great Expectations, made a sound choice. The transition between novel, play and film is so often unsuccessful or simply disappointing (eg Half a Sixpence, Dracula, and Branagh's and Olivier's Shakespeare etc), but Howson has compiled a finely written and eminently performable selection of the key elements of Dickens' complex and sometimes harrowing tale.

Great Expectations is also a great socialist and radical polemic, but that's another story …

I'll tell you how I know: neither John nor I had never read the original novel, but we described the story and the production to a friend after the show over a glass of wine. Roger is very familiar with the novel, and assured us that we had covered the most important developments of the plot and key players from the host of Dickens' different characters, and delivered a coherent and accurate synopsis.

So the story is told well on the stage. This is for several reasons: first, the intelligent yet deceptively simple staging and set. A raised area, empty gilt picture frames, a clothes stand, table and chairs and not much more took us now to the misty, dreich Kentish marshes, now to an upmarket London Gentleman's residence, now to a rural hovel of a cottage. Some smart lighting, and imaginative use of costume helped further the dramatic illusion.

Above all, though, it was the sheer verve and energy of the six actors (four men, two women) who led us through the growth of Pip from pre-puberty to a fully-fledged bourgeois, through ups and downs of the relationships between the Jane Austen-meets-Charlotte Brontë Miss Havisham, the all-fur-coat-and-no-knickers Pumblechook and Mrs Joe, the low life of Magwitch and his world, and the bitterness of the retentive Estella.

Poor Pip, luckless Joe and the oikish Orlick -- but just look at and relish those evocative names! There they were, so many of Dickens' magnificently described characters, all larger than life and full in the face. It was breathtaking just watching them, and the dramatic pace was finely tuned and varied by director Gillian Hambleton throughout, just as the original novel left one gagging for the next instalment.

The Grand Theatre has had some great touring companies in: Chapterhouse (for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream), Pilot from York (for Lord of the Flies) to name but two. To this exalted and distinguished few must be added the superb Northumberland Theatre Company. I hope it is not long before Lancaster audiences will see them again -- it is whispered that they may be touring Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors in the autumn -- with school workshops too.

So watch this space, because I am looking forward to catching this one too.

Copyright © 21 March 2006 Michael Nunn. Picture courtesy and © the Northumberland Touring Company

Web Link:
• The Nouthumberland Touring Company
www.ntc-touringtheatre.co.uk