A Dickens of a Show

By RICHARD CORLISS

At $100 a ticket, Nicholas Nickleby is a bargain: 81/2 solid hours of magic

Mr. Curdle (rearing back in astonishment): Four shillings for one play?

Nicholas: Well, with quite a lot of people in it. And it is very long.

Mr. Curdle: It had better be.

Start with the money. One hundred dollars will buy you one sleeve of a Halston ultrasuede jacket, dinner for two at a Manhattan restaurant or tickets to three conventional Broadway shows. It will also get you into the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, whose first preview performances last week helped launch the new Broadway season. In terms of time and money spent, this sprawling, tumultuous, 8 1/2-hour adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1839 novel is the theatrical bargain of the decade. One off-Broadway musical --five lively actors, 70 easy minutes, the audience seated in chairs designed by a Bauhaus sadist--costs the playgoer 230 a minute. A full day with the Nicklebys costs about 200 a minute. And for each pair of dimes you get another generous, nourishing slice of instant cultural history. Most Broadway shows offer a pleasant enough diversion between sunset and bed; Nickleby will become part of your organism, cast a glow for years to come. So sell the Atari, skip a mortgage payment, pawn the children.

Money cannot often buy the experience that Nickleby provides. But for the next 14 weeks, $100 will.

Rarely has a show landed on Broadway amid such anticipation, fanfare and --so far as the ticket price is concerned --controversy. Just as the Nickleby marquee over the Plymouth Theater dominates Manhattan's West 45th Street, so the R.S.C. production seems sure to set the tone and standard for this season and many to come. It arrives not only as a certified London smash and perhaps a historic theatrical phenomenon but also as a prepackaged television spectacular: the entire performance has been taped for showing as a four-part miniseries on a syndication network in February 1983 so that viewers all across the U.S. will be able to share in the experience.

On a bare stage surrounded by low-tech scaffolding that rises to the rafters and rings the balcony, the R.S.C. tells this 800-page story of a young innocent in the first years of Victoria's reign. The company's 39 actors essay upwards of 250 roles, from weak-willed aristocrat to poor heroic cripple. The play dives into Dickensian bathos, preposterous coincidences, abrupt reversals of fortune, the collision of improbable goodness with impossible evil--and emerges triumphant, soaring with spirit. In the process it displays the grandest theatrical techniques, affirms the Tightness of love and friendship, revives pleasures and poignancies that have all but vanished from modern narrative art. At a time when Broadway is as busy and financially flush as it has been in decades (see following story), the coming of Nickleby demonstrates that it can also accommodate the highest quality. The R.S.C. has fashioned an epic of feeling and intelligence -- a vertiginous celebration of life upon the splendid stage.

In this it is a fitting tribute to its author, for Charles Dickens was a child-man in love with the theater. His earliest memories included visits to the Theater Royal in Chatham; as a schoolboy he would stage spectacles, complete with sound effects, in his own toy theater. For several years at his apogee as a novelist, Dickens spent the bulk of his time as actor-manager of an amateur theater company. In 1851 he produced a one-act farce called Mr. Nightingale's Diary, which he helped write and in which he played six parts, including an old woman and a deaf sexton; in the audience were the Queen and Prince Albert. Dickens' novels are hardly less theatrical, as his contemporaries realized to their quick profit: several stage plagiarisms of Nicholas Nickleby were on the London boards before the novel's serial publication was complete.

The 26-year-old author dedicated Nickleby, his third novel, to William C.

Macready, an eminent classical actor of the day, and with good reason. As Dickens Scholar Michael Slater has noted, "theatricality and role-playing are the living heart of Nicholas Nickleby." At the center of the novel and play are four people who create an extended family --Nicholas, his lovely sister Kate, their tender friend Newman Noggs and the sweet-souled cripple Smike--played with passion, wit and humanity by Roger Rees, Emily Richard, Edward Petherbridge and David Threlfall. But dancing around them is a piebald menagerie of eccentrics, all with devious, theatrical parts to play.

A stirringly funny high point of the show is Nicholas' conscription into a troupe of traveling players headed by the Crummies family. These folk magnify each gesture and emotion like elephant fan dancers and stage a version of Romeo and Juliet in which the corpses come singing back to life. Nicholas' Uncle Ralph, a wily usurer and the evil genius of the piece, discovers his humanity too late, so that it ends by destroying him.

Mrs. Wititterley, the matron lady who hires Kate as a companion, is all filigree and fainting spells; then Kate speaks her mind, and Mrs. W. blows with harridan force. Wackford Squeers, Nicholas' first employer, plays the obsequious pedant to wealthy Londoners, but to their neglected sons back in Dotheboys Hall he is the sadistic schoolmaster of a lad's nightmares, starving and caning his charges till they are lame, blind or dead. Even Smike, the most pitiable graduate of Dotheboys Hall, is not only the slow-witted animal he seems to Squeers; Smike has the pedigree of a gentleman and the love-sodden soul of a Cyrano.

Onstage, only Roger Rees plays one part. The others take many roles; Stephen Rashbrook plays 17, including Cloud, Wall and Horse. And so the identities multiply, the fun doubles, the reverberations become a polyphonic symphony.

One gifted young actress, Suzanne Bertish, plays three women spurned in love:

Squeers' swinish daughter Fanny, a lilt-ingfemmefatale in the Crummies' troupe, a bitter near-deaf crone called Peg. By sulking or shrugging or exacting fatal revenge, she spins three sprightly variations on the theme. Nicholas' sturdiest friend and Kate's most dastardly seducer are both played by the same actor: Bob Peck has a biathlon field day exhibiting the far poles of man's temperaments. Even John Woodvine, a bleak house of malevolence as old Ralph Nickleby, gets to sing as the star of a comic opera skit.

By simultaneously involving and distancing the audience, Nickleby embraces and reconciles many theatrical modes--realism and impressionism, the medieval pageant and the Victorian theater, Brecht and the Living Theater--while telling Dickens' story with enough conviction to make the fine hairs stand up on every playgoer's neck.

From the first scene in Part I, in which members of the audience are handed tasty scones, courtesy of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin (and Crumpet) & Punctual Delivery Company, to the emotionally devastating finale of Part II, a riot of incident fills every corner of the stage. Dialogue scenes are intercut: one pair of actors converses, then falls silent as another, perhaps standing between them, provides exposition on the same subject. The actors coalesce to form an encroaching wall of bodies, the blinking fac,ade of a rich man's house, a Hydrahead of starving Londoners, an aristocrat's carriage (complete with rearing horse). Nicholas and Kate take Smike to the garden of their childhood home--and Kate, in an idyllic gesture that mixes memory and reverie, whirls twice around and into the arms of her two men, her two playmates, her forever family.

While the main scenes are played centerstage, the other actors watch from the sides and the scaffolding. They may be recognizable characters from the play, overhearing but unable to act upon information vital to their interests. Or they may simply be serving as the eyes, ears and unsleeping conscience of both Victorian London and the modern audience.

Perhaps only in England, with its rich dramatic legacy, its heavily subsidized theater and its tradition of actors who devote themselves wholly to their company, could an enterprise like Nickleby even be conceived, let alone brought off with such flourish. It all began in 1978 when Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the R.S.C.

since 1968--and director of the current smash London musical Cats--visited the U.S.S.R. "The director of the Gorky Theater told me that for the next six months his company would be working on the Pickwick Papers," Nunn, 41, recalls. "It emerged that such large-scale adaptations of Dickens are commonplace in Soviet theater. In a sense, that shamed me into it." The following year, inflation devoured much of the R.S.C.'s government grant (the company receives almost 40% of its approximately $12 million budget from the Arts Council). It could afford to stage only one additional new work instead of the usual five. Says Nunn: "It had to be something sufficiently rich for the whole company to commit to."

Nunn and Co-Director John Caird, 33, decided on Nicholas Nickleby and commissioned Playwright David Edgar, 33, to write the adaptation. Edgar, whose Destiny was produced at the Aldwych in 1977 and whose Mary Barnes was staged at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater last year, recalls that "it was a twofold challenge: to convert a rambling, complexly plotted novel into a play in a few months, and to respond to ideas from the two directors, from Designer John Napier, from Composer Stephen Oliver and all those actors." Working communally--an R.S.C. tradition exemplified by Peter Brook's 1970 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream--each performer was asked to research an aspect of life in Victorian England and given a chapter of the novel to paraphrase. "We had a crazy theory," Nunn says, "that if 39 of the cast died, the one survivor could come in and tell the story by himself."

By the spring of 1980 Nunn was unsure whether the production could go ahead. "There was a script for Play I, but Play II was a morass. So John Caird and I went away to a hotel renowned for its good food. I figured we'd run out of time, but John argued vehemently that we could still do it. We were sitting at a table for two, our voices rising in the middle of this exclusive restaurant. We must have resembled nothing so much as two gays who'd gone away for the weekend to sort out their relationship." Nunn and Caird sorted it out well enough: Nickleby opened at the R.S.C.'s London base, the Aldwych Theater, in June 1980. Early reviews ran the gamut from apathy to ecstasy, but audiences loved it from the first. The show returned to the R.S.C. repertory for two more extended runs, and was the hottest ticket in London.

Going by the London experience, audiences who take Nickleby at full strength--four hours at the matinee, 4 1/2 in the evening--will leave the theater in a state very like rapture. This feeling of giddy awe comes partly from spending a day mesmerized by a brilliant troupe of actors, partly from the seductive effulgence of stagecraft, partly from the simultaneous tugs of farce and melodrama, laughter and tears.

But there is something deeper at work here: a shameless, ferociously strong moral sense.

The production focuses on the very characters modern readers of Nicholas Nickleby find to be pasteboard cliches of middle-class sentimentality: noble Nicholas, snow-white Kate, wounded faun Smike--and makes their stodgy virtues real and comprehensible. It renounces the fey modernism of camp; it takes a stand, grows tall in its righteousness, infuses the audience with its passion, brings Dickens back to life not as a carver of curios but as a man who, in George Orwell's phrase, "is generously angry."

It is one of the many strengths of Roger Rees' performance that he is as much the young Dickens as the young Nicholas.

"Nicholas could have been a bit of a prig, you know," says Rees, 35. Instead, Rees has mixed Nicholas' quiet good manners with Dickens' fervent ideals and incorrigible high spirits to create a combustible personality. His voice rarely breaks the whisper barrier, but impulsive outrage sends his face into a turmoil of emotions and makes him start and buck like a corralled stallion. He is forever bolting toward some man of the world to declaim his beliefs, and forever getting into trouble for them. "Ever since Look Back in Anger it's been pretty unfashionable to be virtuous," Rees says of Nicholas. "But there is a need to find some beauty in virtue. You see Nicholas in different lights: impetuous, unformed, weak, almost a porcelain figure. He was, after all, brought up in the petit gentility. But by experiencing great shocks, he gradually learns that the world can be changed, improved by small acts of generosity."

Rees has worked for 13 years at the R.S.C. As pleased as he is to dominate a landmark production, he is uneasy at the prospect of the international stardom that could follow his Broadway and TV exposure. "I love being an actor," he says. "I like pursuing the craft. I'm not interested in the power and the glory."

But he must feel the power, seize the glory, at the end of each Nickleby performance--the audience on its feet, hoarse with cheers, beating its hands to a collective pulp, and Rees onstage, leading new waves of actors on and off for half a dozen curtain calls. To create such a character, to inform such a production, to receive such approval and exult in the reciprocal intoxication--surely this is an actor's life at its most thrilling.

A pity that the experience can be shared by only 55,000 or so U.S.

theatergoers in the next 14 weeks --fewer people than can fill Yankee Stadium for a single game. A greater pity that the $ 100 ticket (a flat rate for any seat in the house, though standing room is being sold for $30) will keep this populist production from reaching most segments of the populace. "It is very odd that something supposed to be enriching is only for the rich," muses Rees. The producers who imported Nickleby--Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs of the Shubert Organization, James Nederlander, Elizabeth McCann and Nelle Nugent --are not subsidized as the R.S.C. is. It is 1 costing $4.4 million to mount the show in New York. Even if 3 Nickleby sells out its entire run, sit is likely only to break even.

Says McCann: "We knew it |wasn't going to make any money. But a special show like this could create a momentum from which we'd all profit."

So far, only about a third of the possible seats have been sold.

The response of theater parties has been notably nil. Says Ronald Lee, president of Group Sales Box Office: "We listed the show in our Broadway gram, which reaches the leaders of 20,000 theater groups, and didn't get one bite." McCann thinks it's not the price that keeps people away, but the show's length. "They need to be convinced that they can sit for 8% hours and still enjoy themselves." The question should not be whether you can sit still, but whether, as Nickleby unfolds, you will ever want to leave. If the show plays to empty seats, the failure will not belong to the R.S.C. or the importers, but to the Broadway audience.

Once each week, the R.S.C. triumph will be presented on successive nights.

Three times a week, on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, both parts will run in one day. Bernard Jacobs, president of the Shubert Organization, hopes audiences will try to attend the all-day marathon, "participating with the actors in a survival experience." It might seem like an endurance test to devote an entire day to a single show; but then, this show is all about survival and transcendence. Behind its overt stage action is the unlikely but compelling story of how a struggling theater company found its soul and its success with the same desperate gamble --risking everything on the belief that people could be touched by the melodramatic adventures of a young man on the labyrinthine path to social maturity. The happy ending remains for the millions of eventual TV viewers--and especially for the lucky Broad way playgoers who will get to see, love, live in Nickleby.

Nicholas (reading a newspaper clip): The Crummies troupe is about to cross the Atlantic on a histrionic expedition, and Crummies is quite certain to succeed.

Mr. Crummies: The Americans are much devoted to grand gestures and the melodrama. (Leaning toward Nicholas with a stage whisper) And I have it on the best authority that they will pay ... almost anything!

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by Bonnie Angela/London

With reporting by Bonnie Angela/London

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