A Dickens of a Show: NICOLAS NICKELBY

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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:

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