Dramaturgs Who Love Dickens . . .
Posted in General, HARD TIMES, Kate Farrington on January 26th, 2010 by Kfarrington – Be the first to commentBy Kate Farrington
I am a bit of a Dickens enthusiast—and by enthusiast I mean fanatic.
The summer I was twelve, my mother gave me an inexpensive copy of Oliver Twist which she carefully inscribed with the month and year. The gesture made me feel that receiving this book, delving into this author’s work, was somehow momentous. I sat perched on the shady corner of the fence in my backyard, my favorite outdoor reading spot, for about two weeks, reading with increasing intensity as we reached the book’s grisly climax. I still own that (now heavily dog-eared) copy of Oliver—it holds a place of honor as the book that launched a lifelong literary friendship.
I have very strong associations of place and time with a number of Dickens’ books, actually. I associate David Copperfield with my grandmother’s house—the second I finished the novel, she insisted on showing me the slightly hammy but charming 1935 W.C. Fields film. A Tale of Two Cities makes me think of my poor cousin who, with her usual good humor, allowed me to read the first chapter aloud to her over the phone because I was so excited by it. And Bleak House, the great literary love of my life, transports me back to my college apartment at three in the morning; being almost physically ill with dread as (spoiler alert) the novel’s heroine, Esther, finally confronts her newly smallpox-disfigured face in the mirror.
I first encountered Hard Times as part of a Dickensian binge in my last year of college—Little Dorrit, Hard Times, and Our Mutual Friend all in a heap. Every Dickens novel has its own personality: light-hearted or ponderous, surreal or painstakingly realistic. Hard Times, from the beginning, struck me as an unusually focused and intense story. There are none of the tangents Dickens is famous for—none of the strange, humorous characters (who have nothing to do with the plot), who turn up on page 8 and then vanish until page 604. It is, as far as Dickens was capable of making it one, a short sharp shock.
So, when the adaptation came up as a possibility for this season, I might or might not have squealed like a 13 year-old Miley Cyrus fan.
Dickens’ family could “hear” him write his books. As he constructed a scene he would often get up and act out the dialogue, carefully choosing the right words and the facial expressions and gestures that should accompany them—whole passages sometimes sprang from these “performances,” one of the many reasons that reading Dickens out loud is a fantastically gratifying experience.
And Dickens himself was a theatre junkie. As a young man still deciding what to do with his life, he had scheduled an audition to join the Drury Lane theatre—and canceled at the last minute when he caught a terrible head cold (just think—in an alternate universe we’d be speaking of those great 19th century actors Kean, Macready, and Dickens). His favorite pastime was planning and performing in amateur theatricals with friends and family. When, late in life, he took to the stage to read his books before paying audiences, he couldn’t get enough of it—the reactions of a live audience were intoxicating to him, and even when his health began to fail he couldn’t bear giving it up entirely.
In short, Dickens is pretty much made for the stage. People have been adapting his work since it first appeared—often they didn’t even wait for the final serialization to be published but made up an ending of their own (much to the outrage of the author). In our own time, A Christmas Carol has a perpetual stage life, while Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities have all had healthy attention. Stephen Jeffreys’ marvelous Hard Times adaptation, first performed in 1982 at the Brewery Arts Centre, is one of the best out there—rich, complex, and true to the novel in all the right ways.
We’ve been in rehearsal for about two weeks now, and it’s proving to be a fascinating process. Our Assistant Director and Movement Coach, Kali Quinn starts rehearsal with an hour of physical work devoted to developing a physical life for this complex little world. Our six actors are finding wonderful differences in the multiple characters they each play, shifting age and class through their voice and movement with increasing ease. And Jim Sullivan is having just as much fun moving them through the beautiful, evocative set Jo Winiarski’s dreamed up. As bits and pieces of Devon Painter’s costumes and Lindsay Jones’ sound-scape find their way into rehearsal, I’m finding it hard to focus on the other parts of my job (blogging for instance?) with so much going on in the room next door.
I can’t wait to see the finished product—more importantly, I can’t wait for you to see the finished product! If you’re new to Dickens, let this be your “inscribed copy” of Hard Times—February 5, 2010 (and onward). You never know, you might just find in him a literary (and theatrical) friend for life.
Kate Farrington's personal copy of a Dickens classic
The inside inscription of Kate's book.
For more about our production of HARD TIMES, click here.
Click here to read Kate Farrington’s article about Charles Dickens’ HARD TIMES.
