Raising the Dickens in London

By JAY COCKS

Nicholas Nickleby celebrates the best of British theater

Taxes were up. The rent was coming due. Everyone needed a job and was worried about going bust. In this Dickensian situation, the Royal Shakespeare Company, by a kind of inevitable inspiration, turned to Dickens.

They worked hard and precipitately. Nicholas Nickleby opened to guarded enthusiasm that turned, over the course of an initial ten-week run, into a national obsession. Nicholas Nickleby helped to right those vexing money matters, became a rallying point for yet another of those renaissances in British theater that occur as regularly as breaks in the weather and, not incidentally, reconfirmed the R.S.C. as the country's premier theater company. If one wanted to go even further and claim that the R.S.C. was the greatest company anywhere just now, the arguments would be inconclusive, but the evidence would be weighted in favor of the affirmative.

Eight and one-half hours of theatrical brilliance is heavy weight indeed, but the R.S.C. bears it away like so much hand luggage. Nicholas Nickleby--back now through the New Year by popular demand and virtually sold out even before it opened--is more than an event or a spectacle. It is a vigorous reaffirmation of theater as a social force and, to use R.S.C. Director Trevor Nunn's word, a "moral" one. The play is personal and political at once, striking at both the heart and the conscience of the audience. A pageant and a celebration, Nicholas Nickleby has the breadth of great theater and the force of life.

Even London's Aldwych Theater is transformed from an auditorium to a living part of Victorian England. Actors in costume greet the audience and show them to their seats. (Playgoers can see the production on two successive nights or, on Saturdays, in a marathon interrupted by a dinner break.) The cast then assembles onstage like a huge family and recites, in alternating chorus, a prologue to the curious life and adventures of Mr. Nicholas Nickleby. If this chorus work is an adaptation of classical theater technique--mastered in another grand R.S.C. production, The Greeks, staged last whiter --the sudden maelstrom of action, humor, high drama, low parody and the occasional song into which the audience is about to be plunged is a breathtaking display of ensemble virtuosity.

Nicholas is a typical young Dickens hero. Steadfast, upright and much beleaguered, he struggles to maintain a life for his sister and newly widowed mother against the unexpected threats and grim incursions of greedy uncles, sinister aristocrats, crooked politicians and assorted malefactors. He holds down a variety of jobs--perhaps most memorably as an actor playing roles like Romeo in the provincial acting troupe of Mr. Vincent Crummies--but his employment is continually being interrupted by some emergency, as the plot loops round, over and back again on itself.

The R.S.C. meets Dickens headon. There is not a moment of archness in the comedy, not a measure of sentimentality in the drama. No one is afraid to grapple with what are usually regarded as Dickens' excesses--of feeling or of outrage --and the result is a shameless but triumphant cavalcade of immediate emotion. There is only one textual alteration, which is minor but telling: a rebalancing of the relationship between Nicholas and the orphan Smike, whom he rescues from an oppressive school in Yorkshire and tries to help. His efforts at this, his successes and his failures, are the core of the play, and the last moments--instead of being quite the cozy denouement arranged by Dickens--become a direct challenge to the audience, "a determination," as former R.S.C. Member Ian McKellen says, "to put laughter and tears into action."

Director Nunn, 40, had been thinking about doing a Dickens adaptation for some time, but the financial crisis of 1979 urged the decision on him. The Conservative government was making worrisome noises about cutting its subsidies to the arts. Since the R.S.C. receives more than one-third of its support from an Arts Council grant, the company cautiously renewed its lease on the Aldwych for only the first half of 1980. This meant that whatever activity was undertaken there would have to keep some 40 actors busy as well as light a fire under the Arts Council.

The choice of Nicholas Nickleby required an entire show to be put together in six months from a play that did not exist. Nunn chose David Edgar, a young British playwright whose work the R.S.C. had staged in the Warehouse, its smaller theater in Covent Garden, to adapt a script from the teeming incidents of Dickens' 800-plus pages. "I was writing Part 2 while rewriting Part 1, and it was all constantly changing," Edgar recalls. Five weeks before the opening, he had reached only the mid-point of Part 2.

While Edgar was typing, Nunn asked all of his 43 actors to initiate their own research projects, read the novel and select which of the 157 characters they wanted to play. Roger Rees and David Threlfall, who are, respectively and wonderfully, Nickleby and the orphan Smike, are the only two actors in the piece with only one part to play. All the others average six: usually two major roles and a gallery of minor parts. R.S.C. Designer John Napier, who made all the costumes, took Polaroid photos for reference and found at the end that he had assembled an album of 271 individual shots, which included all the named characters plus extras in the crowd scenes.

Composer Stephen Oliver was still doing his orchestrations during the last dress rehearsals, but when Nicholas Nickleby was drawn together for its opening last June, all the frantic arranging and joining suddenly appeared to be seamless. "I felt I could even walk into a scene I wasn't normally part of," remarks Suzanne Bertish, a young actress who does hilarious turns as a comely, coy actress and a provincial harridan. "The acting was that deep, that explored."

At first, a far from capacity audience arrived a little dubious. They left, however, weeping and cheering. "I haven't seen scenes like that in 25 years of theatergoing," marveled Irving Wardle, the Times theater critic. After a column by the Times's Bernard Levin that was a mixture of rave, clarion call and marching order, Nicholas Nickleby became not only a triumph but a phenomenon. The R.S.C. was back from the brink again.

Be sure, however, that it will return. This is a company for sharp risks and controlled experiment, which insists not only on tradition but also on the right--indeed, the artistic necessity--to fail. A recent week's sampling of R.S.C. fare in London and Stratford, where the company runs the Royal Shakespeare Theater and an experimental house called the Other Place, showed the company in hot pursuit of both ends of the spectrum. In London, besides the astonishing Nicholas, the company offered an excellent Juno and the Paycock, with a force-of-nature performance by Judi Dench, and, at the Warehouse, a shattering Trevor Nunn staging of The Three Sisters: spare, witty and primal, featuring extraordinary performances by three of the company's young comers (Emily Richard, Janet Dale, Suzanne Bertish) and some of its stalwarts, including Roger Rees.

Up at Stratford, there was Ron Daniels' experimentally modernized Romeo and Juliet, with Romeo (Anton Lesser) and his mates decked out in boots and leather jackets, and Juliet (Judy Buxton) playing her balcony scene atop what looked like an abstract painting. Also at Stratford, R.S.C. Veteran Alan Howard, directed by Terry Hands, was essaying both of Shakespeare's Richards, II and III. In the latter, a sort of cooked-up Jacobean melodrama, Howard hobbled about a raked stage somewhat more fleetly than he actually managed some of the lines.

It is an indication of the substantial respect accorded the R.S.C. that this Richard III received accommodating reviews, while a similarly hyped-up production of Macbeth, starring Peter O'Toole as an unusually incarnadine Thane, at the reconstituted Old Vic, has created a scandal and received an unmerciful critical drubbing. The excesses of the R.S.C. Richard III are no less egregious, but it was the threadbare O'Toole-Bryan Forbes production that quickly exhausted the limited patience and generosity of the London reviewers.

To a theater enthusiast from abroad, it often seems that there is far less in London to try the patience and a lot more to be generous about. In the West End --London's theatrical main stem and mainstream--Tom Courtenay and Freddie Jones are making their way deftly through an adept and affectionate comedy called The Dresser, concerning the trials of a third-rate classical actor on a perpetual tour of the provinces. Practically next door is a new Alan Ayckbourn roundelay called Taking Steps, an alternately hilarious and melancholy meditation on adulteries among the middle classes. The West End can play up raunch (Wot' No Pyjamas! and--yes, in its tenth year--No Sex Please-- We 're British) as well as tradition (yes, going strong and apparently about to enter the second millennium, The Mousetrap) while also accommodating experiment. A radical theater company has been performing Accidental Death of an Anarchist just off Leicester Square, and the R.S.C. has rented a nearby theater for Educating Rita, a lively comedy in which cultures get crossed like phone wires.

The R.S.C. knows audiences almost as well as the company members know their craft, and it has found a fair number of its own productions--Peter Brook's Marat/Sade and A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Homecoming, Sherlock Holmes--exported and expanded from local events to international successes. There are no plans to tour Nicholas Nickleby--the production is too costly and absorbs too much of the company--but Piaf, an intense piece about the French chanteuse, will open in New York this winter, arid The Three Sisters will be taped for TV. Past and present members of the company often turn up on their own in outside productions. Ian McKellen, an actor of formidable power who left the company in 1978, has since starred in the London production of Martin Sherman's Bent and will appear on Broadway this December in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, directed by Peter Hall.

Hall, who now runs the embattled National Theater, created the R.S.C. as a "permanent ensemble and was responsible for expanding the operation from Stratford to London. He departed the R.S.C. in 1968, but says now, "I feel as though I've never left since I've taken so much of it with me. What we did at the R.S.C. colors everything I do."

The R.S.C. can run like a machine but sustains itself like a family. Members typically commit themselves to a season each in Stratford and in London, with out side work negotiable. The pay is short (from $208 to $960 a week), and the training is rigorous. Besides daily rehearsals, actors may log time in movement, fencing and dance classes, as well as brush up on voice and language with the R.S.C.'s crack vocal coach, Cicely Berry. "You've got to make Shakespeare sound so new-minted you could almost hear it in the street," says Judi Dench. Sinead Cusack, who is ending her first Stratford season, says of her earlier work in film and television: "You don't learn very much there, if you haven't had training beforehand. The R.S.C. is the best training ground in the world."

Like a family, too, a theater company is subject to growing pains. Growth at this moment seems to be the biggest challenge the R.S.C. will have to face. Years ago, the company guaranteed its participation in an arts center projected by the City of London. As a result, it is scheduled to move from the Aldwych, perhaps as early as next year, into one of those concrete culture centers that look like a Fuehrerbunker. More space, more audiences, more responsibility and, most difficult, different roots. One problem at the National Theater just now is that the lavish new quarters on the South Bank of the Thames seem -- in the way that culture cathedrals do -- to weigh upon the work rather than let it breathe and flourish. A hothouse is required for an arts center, but a mausoleum is what usually gets built.

But if any company in the world can create heat in the precincts of high art, it is the R.S.C. The main point about Nicholas Nickleby, for example -- as about the R.S.C., as about British theater -- is that the focus, the start and stop of it all, is the audience. Theater in Britain is popular art: "the people's art," as Ian McKellen says. All the reasons for that popularity can be seen in the work of the R.S.C. So can the very heights of that art.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/London

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof

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