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by David Edgar, directed by Jonathan Church

& Philip Franks

Chichester Festival, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto

February 23-April 20, 2008

In 1980 the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Nicholas Nickleby became a theatrical legend.  Now the Chichester Festival production, the first since the original looks set to do the same.  It is simply the grandest, most exciting theatrical experience you are likely to have all year. 

David Edgar's original version of Charles Dickens’s 1839 novel was in two parts and ran to a total of eight and a half hours.  Edgar has revised the play for Chichester and Part I now runs three hours and Part II three and a half.  This is not a hardship, for the story is so engaging and the production is so theatrical that time just flies by.  The story concerns Mrs. Nickleby (Abigail McKern) and her two children Nicholas (Daniel Weyman) and Kate (Hannah Yelland).  Left destitute after the death of their father, the siblings fall under the control of their hardhearted uncle Ralph Nickleby (David Yelland), who separates the two.  In Part I, we follow Nicholas through various careers as schoolteacher under the sadistic Mr. Squiers (Pip Donaghy) and actor in the company of the ebullient Vincent Crummles (Jonathan Coy) climaxing in the most uproarious performance of Romeo and Juliet you’ll ever see.  In Part II we see the success of his employment as a clerk for the cherubic Cheeryble twins (Wayne Cater and David Nellist) and his first encounter with love.  Paralleling this is the story of Kate’s trials reaching their low point, unresolved at the end of Part I, when Ralph basically tries to prostitute her to gain aristocratic clients.  As Edgar emphasizes this is a dark world controlled by money and power, but one in which the virtuous and powerless can still hope to create a just society that takes as it duty the protection of its least fortunate members. 

The play in which  27 actors play over 150 roles encompasses all genres--comic, tragic, satiric, melodramatic, musical and operatic.  The action takes us from the country to the city and through all ranks of society from the humblest to the highest.  In short the whole of Dickens’s vast world, teeming with life is here.  The wide panoply of characters make immediate and lasting impressions.  Full of passion and intensity, Daniel Weymouth and Hannah Yelland completely disprove the view that virtuous characters are not interesting.  As their chief nemesis David Yelland show us man who seems to have repressed all human compassion but as the drama unfolds and his power collapses even we start to feel sympathy for a man whose love of money has so deformed his life.  David Dawson, who  plays Smike a mentally and physically handicapped boy Nicholas rescues from Squiers’s school, gives an absolutely heartbreaking performance.  Yet, every performance from the largest to the smallest roles is of the highest calibre.  The best way to experience this great production is to see both parts on the same day, or failing that on successive days.  Yet, whatever you do, don’t miss it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008.

Photo: Daniel Weyman and David Dawson. Cast photo. ©Robert Day.