Anderson's English - Library Theatre, Manchester - 06/03/10
HOW do you deal with an uninvited guest . . . who then stays for five weeks?
Not too well at all, it would seem, if you are the esteemed Victorian writer Charles Dickens.
The equally-venerated Hans Christian Anderson descended, unannounced, upon the Dickens household in 1857, and it is the convergence of these two literary stars that forms the basis of Sebastian Barry's new play.
Dickens himself may have overlooked it as possible source material, but Barry positively relishes the prospect of the double-Danish speaking Anderson landing in the middle of a Dickens' midlife crisis.
It's certainly no fairytale for the visitor either, struggling to make himself understood, or understand the implosion in his host's household.
This is a Victorian drawing room melodrama on a grand scale, with Dickens about to banish his feeble son Walter to the army in India, his exhausted wife Catherine to London, and place Catherine's sister at the head of his extended family of 10 children . . . so many in fact that several in this touring production have to be played by life-size puppets – a deceit that works remarkably well.
Then again, if Dickens really did deliver everything he ever said in the style of his touring on-stage oratory then Catherine probably got the better of the deal. David Rintoul relishes the role, while Niamh Cusack looks suitably browbeaten by it all.
Danny Sapani suggests a wide-eyed child-like naivet to their foreign visitor and the standard of acting throughout – as you would expect in a production directed by Max-Stafford Clark and staged by Out of Joint and Hampstead Theatre – is thorough.
But while Anderson's English is compact and concise, and never less than melodramatic, it is never quite as moving as it might hope to be.
The plight of family maid Aggie (Lisa Kerr) draws more sympathy . . . just the way Dickens might have preferred?
David Upton
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Weather for Preston
Thursday 29 July 2010
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