LITTLE NELL
Theatre Royal, Bath
Opened 12 July, 2007
***
Peter Hall opens his company’s annual summer season in Bath this year
with one of the classic names, but a novelist rather than a playwright.
Moreover, the title Little Nell
is a deliberate feint; this is not an adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop but an
account of Charles Dickens’s passion for the actress Ellen Ternan. When
they met in 1857 he was aged 45, she 17; already estranged from his
wife, Dickens set up a second home with Nelly and the affair ended only
with his death 13 years later.
Dickens was not only the greatest writer of stories in the English
language, but a compelling stage performer of his own works. Given the
verve and vigour of both prose and performance, it is apt that Simon
Gray’s stage play should in places be somewhat hokey. In adapting
Claire Tomalin’s biography, The
Invisible Woman, he uses the framing device of an imaginary
meeting in 1923 between Ternan’s son by a subsequent marriage and
Dickens’s lawyer son Sir Henry. We are treated to one of the finest
examples of “whoops, exposition” writing, as information is conveyed by
having one character tell the other something they both know perfectly
well: “Your father, George Robinson, was a headmaster.” Lighting
switches the focus between “present” and “past” scenes without actors
leaving the stage; at one point Gray and Hall cheekily require Michael
Pennington as Dickens and Loo Brealey as Nelly to freeze in a
passionate horizontal clinch, which is subsequently implied to be the
occasion of her defloration.
George Robinson (played by Edward Bennett) has more than a little about
him of Chekhov’s schoolmaster Kulygin in Three Sisters: determinedly
devoted, ostensibly innocent of other matters whose shadow lies across
him. We hear a wonderful euphemism employed when he falls into what the
long-suffering Nelly refers to as “one of your unhappinesses”. The
climactic scene, in which Dickens and Nelly argue fiercely before his
final, fatal stroke, rises at moments to almost Dickensian levels of
melodrama. However, like his subject, Gray “buys” this intensity by
getting it to pay off dramatically and emotionally.
Comparatively speaking, such an 85-minute biographical play is a brief
sketch, so we never fully decide whether Nelly’s attitudes sincerely
change over time or whether she has always engaged in the fabulism that
led her to knock a decade off her age to Robinson. Most oppressive to
her is the sense of taking second place to Dickens’s reputation, in the
form of his relentless schedule of public readings and also evidenced
when they were in a train derailment years earlier, with Dickens
ignoring her and her injured mother in order to be seen tending to the
more grievously hurt. Brealey deals with these complexities of
character well, although she may be a little too shy of playing large.
Pennington gives full rein to the more bravura moments of Dickens, yet
is not afraid to commit to the embarrassment of playing middle-aged
infatuation; some of the character’s rhapsodies on his little Nell are
downright disturbing, as if what Dickens was seeking was sexual
communion with his own hyper-sentimentalised fictional creation. Barry
Stanton and Tim Pigott-Smith get the most out of the slightly stilted
scenes between Sir Henry Dickens and Geoffrey Robinson. What a world of
unspoken so-English understanding is contained in the simple exchange:
“I keep a second-hand bookshop. In Slough.” – “Ah.”
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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