IF YOU ARE READING THIS TODAY (04/02) IN LONDON, GO AND SEE THIS PLAY TONIGHT!
In this production, the six actors of the European Arts Company attempt to recreate the first of Dickens' serialisations, The Pickwick Papers. This is the account of a club of gentlemen led by Samuel Pickwick, as they travel around getting into trouble in the last years of stagecoach England.
Like the serialisation, (400 copies sold in its first instalment (March 1836) 40,000 copies of the last instalment (October 1837)) this production gathers pace. The first episodes (Pickwick and Winkle's trip to Dingley Dell to see Mr Wardle, Winkle's falling into the ice and subsequent wooing of the spinster aunt) all unfold in a slightly too leisurely way, with a lot of time spent by the cast shifting boxes into various ingenious positions for very short scenes.
However as soon as the villainous Jingle begins to plot, things pick up. The seduction scene between him and the spinster aunt is an early highlight. Nicholas Waters' interpretation of The Fat Boy is a masterclass in understated characterisation. By which I mean that a)The Fat Boy is always falling asleep b)Waters acts this very well. n.b. ANDREW DAVIES TAKE NOTE: SOME OF DICKENS' CHARACTERS ARE FUNNY.
After 30 minutes, however, the company really raises the game. The episode with Peter Magnus, Most Boring Man of the 1820s, and the Incomprehensible Inn, is brilliantly staged and timed. Paul Lincoln and Richard Latham have an absolute hoot with Dodson and Fogg, lawyers who pop in and out of a wall of box files, waving copies and originals of writs at Pickwick, inciting him to slander and cackling maniacally. n.b. Mr Davies: those satirical bits that you like to play music over, they are also allowed to be funny.
However, the courtroom scene raises the bar again. Here the company reaches the levels of the big boys: certainly Cheek by Jowl (now too portentous and mournful) or even Propellor (outstanding all-male touring Shakespeare company) . Richard Mansfield turns in virtuoso performance as Sergeant Buzfuz, Waters 'does the police in different voices' to recreate the clerks 1)squeaky 2)booming 3)incomprehensible, and credit is due to the plastic skeleton who turns in a virtuoso performance as the judge. A hideous child marionette further bolsters the cast.
The limitations of the play are very often those of the book: 'All of the women characters were the same!' pointed out my 21st century playgoing companion, which is more due to Dickens than Vanessa Morley's excellent turns as the various hysteria stricken damsels of the play. Otherwise, I breathed a sigh of relief at seeing one of CD's novels - which, for numerous reasons easy to see but lengthy to describe, are MADE for the stage - done in the way it should be.
Enough. Find a few travelling companions, gentlemen or otherwise, secure means of transport, and make your way picaresquely and precipitously to Greenwich.
Meanwhile, the wickedness of the Sheriff (Keith Allen) continues unabated. A spirited Locksley girl named Kate (Joanne Froggatt) objects to her brother's forced conscription. As a result she inadvertently gets caught up in the cause of Robin Hood and joins the gang. 
(Toby Stephens) looms larger Robin and Gisborne have to reach an uneasy truce as it emerges that they may have rather more in common than they thought. "
