Literary juggler
Afterlife
Lyttelton
Dickens Unplugged
Comedy
Dickens Unplugged is a new show from the Reduced Shakespeare team. The cast has grown from three to five and they deal with Dickens’s life as well as his work. This fuller approach is strangely damaging to the concept. Watching three radioactive acrobats rattle through the complete works of Shakespeare in 90 minutes was peculiarly thrilling. It wasn’t just an act of literary homage but a blood-and-guts marathon, a feat of physical endurance with all the clarity and purity of record-breaking athletics. The Dickens show, more knowing and more scholarly, is performed by a team of West Coast dudes with guitars. Their laid-back attitude cuts very nicely against the Victorian idiom at first but their zaniness soon becomes sameyness and the show’s sparkle fades towards the end. Best moment: a reformed Scrooge offers Bob Cratchit a pay rise and Tiny Tim flips over his crutch to reveal a Fender Stratocaster on which he belts out a screaming guitar solo. This show belongs in a summer festival. Inside a marquee with the scent of trodden grass and beer in the air it would work a treat. As a night out in the West End it’s a weeny bit threadbare.
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