Pageant Through a Peephole

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY Mobil Showcase Network, Jan. 10-13

The tragedienne Mrs. Crummies, great of girth and spirit, explains to Nicholas why she had to give up her title role in The Blood Drinker: "The audiences, sir," she sighs and smiles, "they could not stand it. It was too... tremendous!"

Modern audiences had no such difficulty with the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. In London in 1980 and a year later on Broadway, David Edgar's 8 1/2hour adaptation of the Dickens novel met with a rapturous reception. In a time when many serious playwrights are hell-bent on reducing life's dilemmas to their sparest parts, panhandling for quiddity, Edgar and Directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird served up a copious celebration of life in all its wickedness and wonder. Led by Roger Rees as the callow, rigorous hero, 39 R.S.C. actors played 150 parts; they set the scene and moved the scenery; they patrolled the rafters and eavesdropped on intimacies. Everywhere in this complex living organism a sense of theatrical community was affirmed, with a dazzling display of stagecraft that never relaxed its grip on the intelligent heart.

In summer 1981, just before embarking for the U.S., the Nickleby company faced a new challenge: how to transfer its achievement, on tape, to TV. Would the production be "too ... tremendous" to fit into the home screen? Ideally, actors would have crept out of the TV frame, perched on top of the console, strolled across the living-room rug to shake out the viewer's passive complacencies. Practically, TV Producer Colin Callender and Director Jim Goddard had two options. They could create a new production for television, with naturalistic sets and discrete scenes, thus reducing the grand babble to Masterpiece Theater whispers. Or they could allow the actors to trace their familiar patterns, asprawl on the big stage, and catch as catch can. They chose the latter, and it was a wise choice; now this epochal production is preserved as fact, not as the fond memory of the 125,000 or so theatergoers lucky enough to have seen it.

It may, however, be initially confusing to millions of Nickleby novices. As host for the four-night series, Peter Ustinov provides helpful plot synopses and snippets of historical background, but he leaves some important unanswered questions for home viewers. Why are most of the actors doubling and tripling their roles? Why are characters breaking off a scene to describe their actions in the imperious third person? Why, when two characters are supposedly alone in a room, are other actors standing around watching them? Why, if this is television, does the camera occasionally cut to a theater audience cheering the performers--even, on two occasions, giving them perfunctory standing ovations? And why, if it is the record of a theatrical experience, does the director make use of such video effects as rapid cutting and multiple exposure? All these are conventions, of stage or small screen, to which the viewer must and can accommodate himself.

Clarifying the play's theme that money rules the Western world, the re-creators have changed the order of some scenes. A late subplot involving Mrs. Nickleby's flirtation with a deranged gent next door has been dropped. Some lovely grace notes go unheard: one especially misses the moment when Nicholas' sister Kate (Emily Richard), in a garden with her brother and their poor crippled friend

Smike (David Threlfall), whirls gaily about and into their arms. The original production blended such small strokes with the most profligate spectacle. On TV the urge toward intimacy is overwhelming, and this Nickleby leaves the viewer with a slight sense of having seen a pageant through a peephole.

Even so, Nicholas Nickleby remains that rarest of commodities, an essential entertainment. The world Dickens created is here in most of its rough glory--a compact universe defined by the imperatives of business, romance and, most of all, the family. Eight families populate Nickleby, from the histrionic Crummleses to the fop-and-frau Mantalinis to the suffocatingly new-rich Wititterleys, and each plays an amusing or fearful variation on the blood tie. At the center are the Nicklebys, tidy repositories of every middle-class virtue. The Kenwigses, with whom Nicholas boards for a spell, are even smugger and snugger: more than a dozen Kenwigses and friends squeeze nightly into their snuffbox-size parlor. Dotheboys Hall, the reeking dregs of Victorian pedagogy, is run by one Wackford Squeers (Alun Armstrong), a scrofulous sadist with his pupils but an egregiously doting husband and father.

Surrounding these families is a gallery of unattached rogues and lost souls: Nicholas' usurer uncle Ralph (John Wood vine), a malefic and finally tragic figure; Ralph's clerk Newman Noggs (Edward Petherbridge), with a frayed past and a lace-valentine soul; Sir Mulberry Hawk (Bob Peck), who pursues Kate with all the arrogance of titled power; and Smike, displaying a feeble dignity by the doggedness with which he endures every outrage.

Through these performances, through the breadth and generosity of its vision, Nickleby still beguiles, enthralls, inspires, astonishes. Its vitality energizes each theatrical moment and effortlessly shames its TV competition. Mobil Oil, which helped finance the production, of fered Nickleby to each of the commercial networks. All three turned it down; and PBS policy would not permit Mobil to run the dozen "institutional" commercials it plans. So an ad hoc congeries of local stations (including 14 PBS affiliates, which will not air the ads) has the privilege of showing Nickleby and denting the prime-time ratings for four nights next week.

Should this splendid show prove a popular success, it would make for an aesthetic and moral triumph that Dickens, friend of the ambitious underdog, would have savored.-- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.