Nicholas Nickleby

In an interview with David Frost only three years ago, Trevor Nunn said that the highlight of his career was doing Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in 1980. Now, 26 years later, Chichester Festival Theatre has revived the play, with Jonathan Church and Philip Franks directing. The original staging ran for more than eight hours; this one, also adapted by David Edgar, has been cut to just under seven, in two parts.

Dickens’s story of Nicholas’s life and adventures, of good and evil, of love given and love received has been imaginatively and triumphantly brought to the stage at Chichester with a cast of 23 playing nearly 100 characters between them.

The great strength of this production is the ensemble acting. As we follow the fortunes of Nicholas (played by Daniel Weyman), we meet his wicked uncle Ralph, the schoolmaster Wackford Squeers in all his brutality and the sad figure of Smike (David Dawson with a puzzling Eastern European accent) at Dotheboys Hall. But the high point for me came at the close of the first part when Nicholas has joined the Crummles company of actors in Portsmouth. Their intepretation of Romeo and Juliet — with a happy ending — was a splendid mix of highly exaggerated acting and riotous singing, which for some reason included Britannia complete with shield declaiming from a balcony.

The whole show zips along as Nicholas and his family encounter decadent members of the aristocracy, the poor and the dispossessed, and the good and the kind — the Cheeryble twins are dressed to kill in bright-blue coats and startling orange wigs.

There is minimal scenery — the odd chair and bench brought on to the stage, a few hats descending from the rafters at Madame Mantalini’s dress shop, for example — but the spirit of Dickens has been cleverly captured throughout.