Untold Theatre’s Beyond Expectations, which had a run this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe and a short tour around the UK, stated an intention to retell Great Expectations with an emphasis on Estella Havisham’s life and story. I saw the show on September 14 at Camden’s Etcetera Theatre, thanks to a press ticket from JVC. I enjoyed Beyond Expectations and found the show’s greatest strengths in the writing and acting. Adapting Dickens is a difficult task but Levinson and Silk’s
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‘The Masque of Anarchy’ at the Manchester International Festival, 2013.
‘The sun looked down through a sultry and motionless air’ (Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, i (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co, 1844), p. 208. Monday 16 August 1819 was a hot day, the weather contributing to the size of the crowd that assembled at St Peter’s Field to attend a political meeting that entered the annals of history under the name ‘Peterloo’. Nearly two hundred years later, around two thousand people a night (12–14 July 2013)
Read moreBrontë by Polly Teale
By Charlotte Mathieson, University of Warwick In May 2013, the Capitol Theatre in Manchester staged a production of the play Brontë, by Polly Teale. Originally staged by Shared Experience in 2005 (of which you can view a short trailer online), the play explores the life and writing of the Brontës through key episodes from their lives and scenes from their writing. I went to watch the production with fellow Victorianist and life-writing specialist Amber Regis, and in this filmed conversation
Read moreDickens in the West End: Great Expectations, adaptations and Dickensian fatigue
by Emma Curry, Birkbeck College Dickens writes in The Old Curiosity Shop of the strange feeling of flatness we experience a short time after an exciting event. He describes Kit Nubbles spending a pleasurable half-holiday off work with his family and friends, drinking tea, eating oysters, and attending a performance at the theatre; only to wake up the next day feeling full of ‘that vague kind of penitence which holidays awaken’.[1] As Dickens’s narrator laments: Oh these holidays! why will
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