BWW Reviews: MISS HAVISHAM'S EXPECTATIONS AND SIKES AND NANCY, Trafalgar Studios, December 12 2014

So Dickens at Christmas then - "God Bless Us One And All!" and all that? Fair enough, but Dickens could roll out the blood and guts, explore the dark heart of humanity and pile on the gothic horror with the best (or is that the worst) of them. We're promised Dickens With A Difference and, with Miss Havisham's Expectations (continuing at the Trafalgar Studios until 3 January), that's what we get.

Di Sherlock conjures Miss Havisham back to life to tell her story again. There's the grief, the revenge and the redemption, this time given voice, and a contemporary voice too, by a real woman, not a faded wedding dress. Linda Marlowe has something of an embittered, aged Kate Bush about her appearance - the beauty is still there, the graceful movement too, but her long ago jilting and her realisation of what she has wrought upon both Estella and Pip has twisted her soul. She knows it, though, and commands the stage not just with her blazing eyes and physical presence (this Miss Havisham is not one for sitting in a chair) but with her dark comedy and her mordant wit.

It's not quite a one-woman show, as Estella and others appear in video segments, but this is very much Marlowe's show, as her will forces us to observe and to judge but not to pity. It would be a bravura acting display from a woman twenty years her junior (as Miss Havisham was at the time of Great Expectations) but it is remarkable in a woman in her mid-seventies, those two additional decades lending the show its critical enhanced perspective. And, half a lifetime away from when I read the book (and was, understandably perhaps, more interested in Estella), I shall return to it more interested in Miss Havisham.

Less difference in its Dickens, but just as captivating in delivery, is James Swanton's Sikes and Nancy (also continuing at the Trafalgar Studios until 3 January). Like many others, my knowledge of one of Dickens' most famous setpiece readings is drawn from Oliver Reed's menacing Sikes in Oliver! - the blood, the bullying and Bullseye.

It takes some time to get to Sikes himself in Swanton's adaptation - first we meet Fagin and his spy. And here, any throughts of Ron Moody's joyous, charismatic Pied Piper Fagin disappears. Swanton uses his extraordinary long fingers to create a snivelling grotesque fencer of stolen goods, a grown-up guttersnipe. There's something of Rik Mayall in Swanton's rubbery features contorting to suggest on the outside what's going on inside as the gallery of villains are brought before us.

His Nancy is a decent but frightened woman surrounded by evil, most obviously in the man who holds her prisoner before doing away with her in a most brutal, visceral manner before getting his comeuppance. Swanton's Sikes is a vicious coward, his violence no less real for its want of a physical victim on stage. The power of the storytelling is such that one turns away from the murder, in horror at the deed, given proper value for its hideous consequence. Swanton's performance burrows into your imagination and makes things more real than they might be if acted out with props and cast.

Neither of these shows are suitable for kids. They restore a Dickens sometimes lost with the biscuit tin scenes and the "Thank You Very Much". There's nothing sentimental about either production - the writer's immense authority brought to bear on man's inhumanity, not man's humanity. It's a sobering thought and one that Dickens himself was keen to project - Marlowe and Swanton have done him proud.

To post a comment, you must register and login.