TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.57

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 17KB | 312 lines

                                                                                THEATER

Nicholas Nickleby

A Dickens of a Show


At $100 a ticket, Nicholas Nickleby is a bargain: 8 1/2 solid
hours of magic


Mr. Curdle (rearing back in astonishment):  Four shillings for
one play?

Nicholas:  Well, with quite a lot of people in it. And it is
very long.

Mr. Curdle:  It had better be.

Start with the money. One hundred dollars will buy you one
sleeve of a Halston ultrasuede jacket, dinner for two at a
Manhattan restaurant or tickets to three conventional Broadway
shows. It will also get you into the Royal Shakespeare
Company's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, whose
first preview performances last week helped launch the new
Broadway season. In terms of time and money spent, this
sprawling, tumultuous, 8 1/2-hour adaptation of Charles Dickens'
1839 novel is the theatrical bargain of the decade. One
off-Broadway musical--five lively actors, 70 easy minutes, the
audience seated in chairs designed by a Bauhaus sadist--costs
the playgoer 23 cents a minute. A full day with the Nicklebys
costs about 20 cents a minute . And for each pair of dimes you
get another generous, nourishing, slice of instant cultural
history. Most Broadway shows offer a pleasant enough diversion
between sunset and bed; Nickleby will be part of your orgasm,
cast a glow for years to come. So sell the Atari, skip the
mortgage payment, pawn the children. Money cannot often buy
the experience that Nickleby provides. But for the next 14
weeks, $100 will.

Rarely has a show landed on Broadway amid such anticipation,
fanfare and--so far as the ticket price is concerned--
controversy. Just as the Nickleby marquee over the Plymouth
Theater dominates Manhattan's West 45th Street, so the R.S.C.
production seems sure to set the tone and standard for this
season and many to come. It arrives not only as a certified
London smash and perhaps a historic theatrical phenomenon but
also as a prepackaged television spectacular:  the entire
performance has been taped for showing as a four-part mini-
series on a syndication network in February 1983 so that
viewers all across the U.S. will be able to share in the
experience.

On a bare stage surrounded by low-tech scaffolding that rises
to the rafters and rings the balcony, the R.S.C. tells this
800-page story of a young innocent in the first years of
Victoria's reign. The company's 39 actors essay upwards of 250
roles, from weak-willed aristocrat to poor heroic cripple. The
play dives into Dickensian bathos, preposterous coincidences,
abrupt reversals of fortune, the collision of improbable
goodness with impossible evil--and emerges triumphant, soaring
with spirit. In the process it displays the grandest theatrical
techniques, affirms the rightness of love and friendship,
revives pleasures and poignancies that have all but vanished
from modern narrative art. At a time when Broadway is as busy
and financially flush as it has been in decades, the coming of
Nickleby demonstrates that it can also accommodate the highest
quality. The R.S.C. has fashioned an epic of feeling and
intelligence--a vertiginous celebration of life upon the
splendid stage.

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
Crummles family. These folk magnify each gesture and emotion
like elephant fan dancers and stage a version of Romeo and
Juliet in which the corpse 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 up 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:
Squeers' swinish daughter Fanny, a lilting femme fatale in the
Crummles' 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 playgoers 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 facade 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 center-stage, 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 percent 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."

Nunn and Co-Director John Caird, 33, decided on Nicholas
Nickleby and commissioned Playwright David 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, 4 1/2 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.
"Nicholas could have a bit of a prig, you know," says Rees, 35.
Instead, Rees has mixed Nicholas' quiet good manners with
Dickens' fervent ideals and incorrigible high spirits to create
a combustible personality. His voice rarely breaks the whisper
barrier, but impulsive outrage sends his face into a turmoil of
emotions and makes him start and buck like a corralled stallion.
He is forever bolting toward some man of the world to declaim
his beliefs, and forever getting into trouble for them. "Ever
since Look Back in Anger it's been pretty unfashionable to be
virtuous," Rees says of Nicholas. "But there is a need to find
some beauty in virtue. You see Nicholas in different lights:
impetuous, unformed, weak, almost a porcelain figure. He was,
after all, brought up in the petit gentility. But by
experiencing great shocks, he gradually learns that the world
can be changed, improved by small acts of generosity."

Rees has worked for 13 years at the R.S.C. As pleased as he is
to dominate a landmark production, he is uneasy at the prospect
of the international stardom that could follow his Broadway and
TV exposure. "I love being an actor," he says. "I like
pursuing the craft. I'm not interested in the power and the
glory."  But he must feel the power, seize the glory, at the end
of each Nickleby performance--the audience on its feet, hoarse
with cheers, beating its hands to a collective pulp, and Rees
onstage, leading new waves of actors on and off for a dozen
curtain calls. To create such a character, to inform such a
production, to receive such approval and exult in the reciprocal
intoxication--surely this is an actor's life at its most
thrilling.

A pity that the experience can be shared by only 55,000 or so
U.S. theatergoers in the next 14 weeks--fewer people than can
fill Yankee Stadium for a single game. A greater pity that the
$100 ticket (a flat rate for any seat in the house, though
standing room is being sold for $30) will keep this populist
production from reaching most segments of the populace. "It is
very odd that something supposed to be enriching is only for the
rich," muses Rees. The producers who imported Nickleby--Gerald
Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs of the Shubert Organization, James
Nederlander, Elizabeth McCann and Nelle Nugent--are not
subsidized as the R.S.C is. It is costing $4.4 million to mount
the show in New York. Even if Nickleby sells out its entire run,
it is likely only to break even. Says McCann:  "We knew it
wasn't going to make any money. But a special show like this
could create a momentum from which we'd all profit."

So far, only about a third of the possible seats have been
sold. The response of theater parties has been notably nil.
Says Ronald Lee, president of Group Sales Box Office:  "We
listed the show in our Broadwaygram, which reaches the leaders
of 20,000 theater groups, and didn't get one bite."  McCann
thinks it's not the price that keeps people away, but the show's
length. "They need to be convinced that they can sit for 8 1/2
hours and still enjoy themselves."  The question should not be
whether you can sit still, but whether, as Nickleby unfolds, you
will ever want to leave. If the show plays to empty seats, the
failure will not belong to the R.S.C. or the importers, but to
the Broadway audience.

Once each week, the R.S.C triumph will be presented on
successive nights. Three times a week, on Wednesdays, Saturdays
and Sundays, both parts will run in one day. Bernard Jacobs,
president of the Shubert Organization, hopes audiences will try
to attend the all-day marathon, "participating with the actors
in a survival experience."  It might seem like an endurance test
to devote an entire day to a single show, but then, this show
is all about survival and transcendence. Behind its overt stage
action is the unlikely but compelling story of how a struggling
theater company found its soul and its success with the same
desperate gamble--risking everything on the belief that people
could be touched by the melodramatic adventures of a young man
on the labyrinthine path to social maturity. The happy ending
remains for the millions of eventual TV viewers--and especially
for the lucky Broadway playgoers who will get to see, love, live
in Nickleby.

Nicholas (reading a newspaper clip):  The Crummles troupe is
about to cross the Atlantic on a histrionic expedition, and
Crummles is quite certain to succeed.

Mr. Crummles:  The Americans are much devoted to grand gestures
and the melodrama. (Leaning toward Nicholas with a stage
whisper)  And I have it on the best authority that they will
pay. . . almost anything!

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by Bonnie Angelo/London