The Stage

Dickens of a time

Published Friday 3 February 2012 at 17:38

Charles Dickens created some of the most iconic novels and characters in English Literature. Nick Smurthwaite paints an intimate portrait of the writer and looks at some of the great adaptations and events on offer to celebrate his 200th birthday

If he hadn’t become a writer, Charles Dickens would almost certainly have opted for a career on the stage. He always loved acting and actors and began a lifetime of theatregoing in his teens. He counted famous actors as friends, among them Charles Mathews (1776-1835), known for his comic performances, a big influence on Dickens the performer, and William Macready (1793-1873), the leading actor-manager and tragedian of his day, whom Dickens had much admired in his youth. He dedicated Nicholas Nickleby to Macready.

Dickens aspired to be an actor himself before he became a writer, and he was only able to combine the two later in life when he won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic for the barnstorming one-man shows with which he became obsessed.

Melodrama and histrionics illuminated his writing with the power of a searchlight, making the stories ripe for stage - and later film - adaptation. According to Simon Callow, whose new book about Dickens is published this month, the author was often infuriated by these dramatised versions, probably because he’d rather have written them himself.

Nevertheless, from Pickwick onwards, Dickens’ wonderfully robust and colourful characters provided actors of the day with an endless supply of juicy roles to play.

In his lifetime, the theatre underwent massive changes, thanks to the installation of gas lighting, and the passing of the Theatres Act of 1843 which prompted a building boom. While music hall grew in popularity as the entertainment of the masses, London’s cultured elite were more interested in the dramatic offerings of the actor-managers, such as Charles Kemble and Henry Irving.

Being hungry for all kinds of theatrical experience, Dickens probably sampled a bit of everything, from Prospero to panto, and he certainly would have visited club theatres where stage-struck wannabes paid a fee to take part in the proceedings on stage. Being a keen amateur himself, Dickens had no difficulty in relating to the desire to get up there and strut your stuff.

He often managed to persuade professional actors to appear in his own productions, normally staged for charity, including the Ternan sisters, Maria and Ellen. Later, of course, he entered into a relationship with Ellen. Interestingly, though, Dickens achieved surprisingly little success as a playwright. Callow puts this down to a “slavish desire” to imitate the drama of the day. “So desperately in love was he with the theatre of his own time, that he simply imitated it,” says Callow.

However, the great novelist was clearly deluded about his potential as a writer for the stage. In a letter to his composer friend John Hullah, he expressed the wish that The Village Coquettes (1836) would be the play that would “introduce me to the public as a dramatic writer”. But the show was poorly received and closed after 16 performances.

Macready was all set to produce his play The Lamplighter (1838), but after a few rehearsals the actor decided it would not stand up to Dickens’ literary reputation and withdrew it from the programme. Quite how this impacted on their friendship is unclear, but it was the beginning of the end of Dickens’ aspirations to be a great stage dramatist. Perhaps Macready assuaged his friend’s disappointment by assuring him of his histrionic gifts. The actor once declared himself “amazed and dazzled” by his friend’s virtuosity. There is no doubt that Dickens was a mighty powerful presence on stage, judging by the countless faintings and swoonings that occurred during his performances.

As Callow points out, the great innovation of his solo shows was that Dickens spoke directly to the audience while narrating his stories, then would suddenly switch into character as Little Nell, Fagin or Mrs Gamp, just as Callow now does in his Dickens show. “He was a brilliant mimic and brought each of his characters to dazzling life,” says the actor.

Callow finds “an almost psychedelic quality” in Dickens’ writing, constantly and rapidly changing from one scene and one character to the next. “It is as if the conscious mind is so beguiled by the constant shifts and twists - the conjuring tricks - of the narrative that the emotions are taken unawares,” he says.

As an impressionable young theatregoer, Dickens was a huge fan of the comic actor Charles Mathews who was one of the few players of his time to appear on stage as himself, using original material based on happenings - or mishaps - in his own life. In the course of these monologues, he would assume various characters and disguises. Years later, when Dickens took to the stage as himself, he used the same tricks and conceits he had learnt from Mathews, only with the great benefit of his own popular narratives - already familiar to most of his audience - to rivet attention.

Dickens once said that enjoying a theatrical experience should resemble “a delightful dream in which one had the sensation of having for an hour or two quite forgotten the real world, and of coming out into the street with a kind of wonder”.

• Dickens and the Theatre - Nicholas Nickleby and the RSC will take place at the BFI Southbank, London, on February 25. The Dickens on Screen season continues until February 28. Simon Callow’s book, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, is published by Harper Press. For Dickens bicentenary events, visit www.dickens2012.org

• To win tickets to Dickens on Screen go to www.thestage.co.uk/competitions