A Dickens Epic Hits the Road

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby shifted from London to Broadway in September 1981, theatergoers gasped at the record-setting $100 ticket price and bottom-numbing 8 1/2-hr. length. Co-Producer Bernard Jacobs of the Shubert Organization described seeing both halves in one day as "participating with the actors in a survival experience." Nonetheless, Nickleby's 14-week run became a sellout, playing to almost 55,000 people and leaving countless others feeling they had missed a triumph never to be repeated. ,

That gloomy prediction has proved premature. The R.S.C. returned Nickleby to its repertory last Christmas, albeit with an almost entirely new cast. Now the revival is playing in Los Angeles as the kickoff of a U.S. tour slated to include Washington, Philadelphia and Boston after a return to Broadway next month. Once again, the top ticket price is $100. And once again, audiences are discovering that Nickleby may be the most jubilant and thrilling experience to be had in a theater.

The initial wonder of the show is that unlike most adaptations, David Edgar's script does not merely excerpt Charles Dickens' 800-page novel about greed vs. decency in Victorian London: virtually all of it is there, twists and turns, guffaws and grief, more than 130 characters wearing some 375 costumes and 75 wigs. Yet the epic sweep almost never overwhelms the emotional intimacy. Good ultimately triumphs in each of the half a dozen interwoven plots, but the show ends with the now wealthy title character carrying an abandoned boy--a symbol of the hapless children whom Nicholas frees from the sadistic Dotheboys Hall and of the innumerable others who continue to suffer poverty and abuse, in Dickens' time and our own. Fans of the original will find few differences in the new staging, again by Trevor Nunn (Cats) and John Caird (Les Miserables). Most of the performances seem like carbon copies. Two are distinct improvements. As Vincent Crummles, proprietor of a hammily inept acting troupe, Tony Jay is a figure of majesty, an artist surrounded by buffoons whose incompetence he must overlook because some of the worst are members of his family. As Lord Frederick Verisopht, the luxuriating rake who accosts Nicholas' sister, Simon Templeman reveals a dreamy, drunken boy, easily misled, whose final repentance thus makes sense.

In two pivotal roles, recasting reduces the pain and power of the play. Michael Siberry, blond and robust, plays Nicholas as one of nature's optimists, buoyant with pride and hope. The dark, hollowed look and manner of the original Nicholas, Roger Rees, better suggested the character's boundless disillusionment. As Nicholas' battered Dotheboys friend Smike, David Threlfall was recognizably a victim of cerebral palsy, lame and inarticulate, whose great soul struggled to overcome his infirmities. His successor, John Lynch, skitters and jibbers in an otherworldly fashion that never resembles any sympathy-evoking affliction.

These shortcomings do not blunt Nickleby's potent storytelling; they affirm it. In 1981 the show seemed a magic moment in which acting, directing and design had come together to create something wonderful yet ephemeral. The passage of time and the revival by other hands, even if imperfect, allow audiences to see that Nickleby is a permanent, and major, contribution to the literature of the stage.