A Dickens of a Show: NICOLAS NICKELBY

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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 façade 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."

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