Great Expectations

Synopsis

Pip's s impoverished childhood takes on a new dimension when he meets the strange Miss Havisham. An unknown benefactor turns Pip into a gentleman but he falls prey to the corruption of money.

Our Review:

8 December 2005

“Rotten architecture but wonderful gargoyles” is how Orwell described Charles Dickens’ writing. In fact Great Expectations is one of Dickens’ best-plotted books, with the pace of the thriller, lending itself far more easily to a stage adaptation than the wildly acclaimed 1970s Royal Shakespeare Company production of Nicholas Nickleby.

That’s not to say this book lacks gargoyles, chief among them the escaped convict Magwitch and Miss Haversham, perfectly cast here with the wonderful Sian Phillips as the vengeful, mouldering spinster. (Rather chillingly, Phillips is now a ringer for Livia, the character she played in I, Claudius in the 1970s.)

Whenever a novel is adapted for stage or screen, the question inevitably begged is, how much is lost in the process, particularly in the case of a writer like Dickens, whose work, like Shakespeare’s, contains worlds. On the positive side this production, produced by the Cheek by Jowl artistic dir...

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Latest User Review

194.75.129.200) - 30 January 2006:

Charles Dickens never having been one of my favourite authors – probably the paradoxical result of a combination of being urged to read his works at school but of never having the opportunity to study them properly – I was somewhat apprehensive about how I would react to seeing the RSC's production of Great Expectations, especially since this was not one of the Dickens novels I had actually read and I did not even know the full details of the plot! The show was put on in association with Cheek by Jowl, and used an adaptation of the novel by Nick Ormerod and Declan Donnellan. A simple but very effective design principle governed the production, backdrops (a blank grey screen for the dank fogs of the Kent marshes, a wall of soot-blackened bricks inset with tiny windows for a dark London alley and a moth-eaten brown velvet curtain for the interior of Miss Havisham's house) being combined with individual furnishings – including a kitchen dresser in Pip's sister's home, a bookcase and desk in the lawyer's office and the table on which Miss Havisham's unused wedding cake, now covered in cobwebs, still stood – to indicate the various locations. Company members often acted as a kind of Greek chorus to the main action – sometimes describing a scene or even speaking parts of the lines belonging to other characters; sometimes just watching on as if they too were witnessing the story-telling and thereby creating a link between we in the audience and the stage that enhanced our sense of involvement in the performance. Samuel Roukin made a fine and sympathetic Pip, often commenting with an admirable air of detachment on the vagaries of the situations into which his "great expectations" (and his own false assumptions) tended to lead him, and capturing perfectly the ambiguities inherent in his relationships with Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella. In what was a fine ensemble performance, Robert Sloman's Magwitch (at whose death from illness before he could be hanged we were ultimately as relieved as Pip) and Sian Phillips's Miss Havisham (who, although she initially set out to use Pip, clearly came to feel as much affection for him as she could for anyone) also stood out. Overall, this was a very enjoyable production which, as well as telling the story of the novel, illustrated (without being too didactic about it) its elements of social commentary on the Victorian age. It also proved my anxieties about seeing it to have been completely unfounded. Whilst it did not make me want to rush out and buy the complete works of Charles Dickens to put on my bookshelf, it certainly left me far more inclined to revisit them than I had been before! ...

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