MUD, MARSH, MONEY
Now right here’s a bracing new method to do Dickens: keep away from units stuffed with Victoriana by protecting the stage just about empty beneath a set of uneasily shifting lighting-bars evocative of a tidal river. Cut out all of the harrumphing Cheeryble rhetoric and lovable Peggotying; select a late, least-familiar novel and get Ben Power to fillet the that means out of the story in brief scenes, as he did with the Lehman Trilogy. Then discover a trendy , eerily authentic and hypnotic songwriter – PJ Harvey – to set 13 songs for people and whole-cast refrain at moments of excessive emotion.
I believe Ian Rickson’s manufacturing , based mostly on Our Mutual Friend, shall be, as they are saying, Marmite. It’s over three hours lengthy , lacks set-piece glamour, has no want to razzle-dazzle you, and Bunny Christie’s unusual set of shifting bars of sunshine overhead could also be downright unsettling till you see it as reflections from our historic uneasy estuary.
But it’s a form of bizarre masterpiece and precisely what the NT needs to be doing. I used to be drawn into the thought of the murky previous river-life of the London Thames from the second the forged (21 sturdy) scrambled singing from the downstage pit and Jake Wood’s Gaffer Hexam – a plank representing his boat – discovered a drowned corpse, picked its pockets as was his approach, and towed it residence whereas his light daughter Lizzie (Ami Tredrea) started narrating their world.
The plot has all of the intricate bonkers high quality we love in Dickens: a foul previous miser has left his cash , made in “dust” – garbage disposal – to his son John who ran off to Africa. But the situation is that John marries Bella, from a low-born however respectable household. Since the returning son is regarded as the corpse, the cash goes to Noddy Boffin, an worker who’s thus propelled into the prosperous center courses and adopts Bella into his richer residence out of kindness. Baffled by enterprise, he takes on a secretary who’s after all really the non-dead John (Tom Mothersdale). He observes and falls in love with Bella, who’s getting a bit flighty in her new upper-middle standing and unkind to her sincere struggling actual household. Meanwhile again down the social scale Gaffer the corpse-fishing riverman is regarded as a assassin, and dies – leaving daughter Eliza to wrestle alone to get her brother Charley the training which can allow him to rise in society, whereas their status is blighted by the daddy’s crime.
Which by the best way he didn’t do. Oh, and up in Holborn – every London district flagged in surtitle – there are attorneys, as ever in Dickens, together with Eugene (Jamael Westman) who’s fated to fall in love with Lizzie and educate her by studying Ovid collectively within the sundown beside Deptford Creek.
So it’s all about cash and sophistication and injustice and deprivation and the upward wrestle of training, and it’s difficult. But Rickson retains it completely clear: characters are drawn economically however sharply, Bella McLean’s Bella ready, inside transient moments of dialogue, to develop and develop up. The two romantic heroes’ glamour is offset by the truth that by and enormous the ladies have extra sense than the boys, although tending to be victims of their very own generosity (Dickens by this time knew so much about that, to not his credit score).
And there are moments of nice leisure: some appreciable laughs are offered by Jenny Wren, fiery little Ellie-May Sheridan on a beautiful skilled debut because the teenage daughter of a drunkard ,making her approach by confecting dolls’ bonnets in Limehouse poverty with Eliza. She embodies a pitiless adolescent feminism, her one-line retorts bringing multiple snort of surprising laughter. Other good laughs are offered by Scott Karim , barnstormingly nasty as prim Bradley Headstone, the savage rote-learning schoolteacher who actually deserves to finish up within the river.
The quintessential Dickens strains Power picks up or adapts are all the time alternative ones, just like the policeman explaining that it’s hardest to seek out murderers as a result of “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 to not 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 studying an extended novel, flowing alongside and immersing your self within the brawling, hoping, tragicomic enterprise of small vital lives each middling and harsh. You dwell with them in a London of intermingled fortunes and emotions. To construct these three hours of escape and empathy PJ Harvey’s music performs a significant half. The singing is easy and unadorned, each tune pure to the second, expressing its fact. Harvey’s tunes are struggles and yearnings, lengthy mournful notes and falling triplets. They have all of the atmospheric energy of a river buoy’s whistle and clang on a foggy night time. Loved the journey.
nationatheatre.org.uk. to 22 June
Rating 4.
