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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, 4½ 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.