THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Based on Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, adapted by Ben Power; songs by PJ Harvey and Ben Power
National Theatre (Lyttleton), South Bank, London SE1 9PX until June 22, 2024
Ben Power who had a great success with The Lehman Trilogy is back at the National for this collaboration with the acclaimed singer-songwriter PJ Harvey, who provides an album full of new work for this 'play with songs'. It adapts Dickens's great last novel in which the River Thames itself was a key protagonist. Dickens loved the teeming, endlessly busy human life that happened on and around the river and the many trades, and livings and characters that thrived there amid the ebb and flow of the tide, which brought life and death with it.
No other writer of the time made the poor and dispossessed so central to their novels or was as angry about their suffering. The daily humiliations of poverty were seared into the plotlines (his father died in a debtors prison), and he was particularly taken by those on the edges, those desperately aspiring to gentility, as personified here in the character of young Charlie (Brandon Grace) whose sister Lizzie (Ami Tredrea) is a central protagonist here. Despite being the gentle daughter of the bullying Gaffer Hexam (Jake Wood), who lives off what comes out of the pockets of the corpses he fishes from the river, her ambition is to liberate her brother from all this through education. This sets him under the malign influence of Bradley Headstone (Scott Karim), a prim, rote learning, headmaster who later has to compete with Eugene Wrayburn as her suitor. Wrayburn's a kindly lawyer, played by Hamilton star Jamael Westman, whose approach to her education is a lot more enlightened.
The plot pivots around a second main thread involving the mysterious John Rokesmith (Tom Mothersdale) who pursues Bella Wilfer (Bella Maclean), the headstrong daughter of a bank clerk who, about to come into money, might have it all whipped away after the man arriving in London to be her fiancé is fished out of the river ...or is it him? Director Ian Rickson does wonders in spinning the 21-strong cast and the various intersecting plots. The characters are sharply and economically drawn, and the pace rarely slackens.
The ensemble is brilliantly cast, but the standout is Ellie-May Sheridan in her stage debut as Lizzie's spirited, waif-like pal Jenny Wren, maker of dolls clothes, who has survived an alcoholic father and laments “the endless job of forgiving men”. While Tredrea is commanding as Lizzie, her continual choice of martyrdom in the face of Wrayburn's kindness does stretch credibility in this reading, considering her options would have been so limited. The great character actor Peter Wight is also a scene stealer as the lovable Mr Boffin, a prosperous trader in dust, no less!
Dickens's social commentary and his biting satire of inequality comes powering through in this adaptation. Out goes the cluttered Victoriana of Sunday night TV with its lovably gurning supporting cast, and instead Bunny Christie's monochrome design is sparse. It is brilliantly aided by Jack Knowles's ingenious lighting design, which is dominated by a low-level gantry of lights which at times rise to twinkle like stars set above the turgid waters.
It's curiously refreshing, as is the contribution of PJ Harvey's songs. A band of three play them on stage and they are simple, mournful, and unadorned but perfectly matched to the moment. They greatly enhance Rickson and Power's atmospheric celebration of this great novel.
