Nicholas Nickleby, Or, How I Survived Seven Hours of Dickens

In his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard has one of the title characters explode at a band of travelling tragedians, who make their living by performing heart-tugging plays with endings full of corpses.

“Actors!” he snaps. “The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone – it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says – ‘One day you are going to die.’”

As I sat through both parts of Nicholas Nickleby yesterday afternoon and evening (each part is a little over three hours long), it was Guildenstern’s outraged outburst that ran through my mind.

Despite its length, Nicholas Nickleby is an entertaining show. There’s a large Dickensian cast, the performers are lively and talented enough to sketch each new character to life with a line or two, and there are virtuous heroes with just enough flaws to root for and wicked villains who are just sympathetic enough that they finally evoke pity rather than hate*. Most of the audience seemed to love it; I saw a surprising number of children who’d been brought by their parents and a large number of senior citizens who left the theatre all smiles. Each show got a standing ovation at the end.

But nothing caught me unawares and started the whisper.

Now, I don’t mean that the purpose of every theatre show should be to make each member of its audience immediately and personally aware of its own mortality. Nor even that all theatrical deaths ought to be everyday and gut-wrenching and sincere the way real deaths are. There are times and places for different styles; a Saving-Private-Ryan war at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though technically supported by Theseus’s mention of conquering Hippolyta’s Amazons, is not at all appropriate if one hopes to develop a frothy romantic comedy afterwards. But I do want a play (or book or movie) to catch me unawares and whisper something I wasn’t expecting.

That thing can be, “Wow, water can mean a whole bunch of different things” (Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses). It can be, “See, you can feel sympathy for a character like that after all.” (Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?) It can be, “Oh, so that’s what the story of the Little Mermaid is all about” (Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s Once on This Island) or, “Hey, it is funny that we call a horse race ‘the Queen Victoria cup’” (Monty Python’s Queen Victoria sketch), or, “Art, history, and race are different than you think” (Jim Bartley’s Stephen and Mr. Wilde).

It was difficult for me to watch Nicholas Nickleby without feeling like I was being deliberately manipulated to force my emotions in a particular direction. I’ve never before seen a play with live background music, like a movie, and it gave the production a somewhat pantomime air: “Feel sad now! Can’t you hear the violins and minor key?” I recognize that Dickens is known as the king of emotional manipulation, his favourite tactic being to place a vulnerable, child-like figure in emotional and physical danger (Nicholas Nickleby’s Smike has compatriots in Tiny Tim and Little Nell), possibly killing them off after their rescue after being sure to emphasize the heartbreaking fact that they were loved dearly by all their abler companions, but the whole process still felt… unfortunate.

I like emotion, but I like it best when it whispers unexpectedly in my ear. I like the sudden surge of joy of Edward Hardwicke’s Dr. Watson greeting his newly returned-from-the-dead friend, with his hair all mussed up and a smile he can’t keep off his face. I like the deep sadness of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s pathetic attempts to escape their fates and the strange nostalgic twinge of Peter Pan telling Wendy she’s too grown-up. But when I can see it coming – when the playwright, composer, and actors point out in big neon letters, “YOU SHOULD LOVE THIS CHARACTER, BECAUSE HE IS PATHETIC!” or “SOMETHING BAD HAPPENED TO SOMEONE WHO REALLY, REALLY DIDN’T DESERVE IT! YOU SHOULD FEEL SAD!”, I can hardly bring myself to care. Smike, the mentally and physically disabled abused drudge, though well-acted by a drooling and stuttering David Dawson, didn’t engage my sympathies at all, because I could see my heart was meant to melt at his plight**. However, David Yelland’s nefarious Ralph Nickleby did. Not because I thought he’d had it tougher than Smike or deserved it less, but because I was allowed to judge him for myself.

The same feeling of “enh, too simplistic” goes for the play’s political, moral, and intellectual messages, too. I don’t know whether this is the company’s intent, but a lot of reviewers seem to feel that the most wonderful part of Nicholas Nickleby is how it brings to the audience’s notice important issues of today like homelessness and poverty. (Richard Ouzounian, whose review was reprinted in the programme, writes, “The world has sadly not changed that much since 1838 and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is there to remind us of that fact.”) Well, if the play sat in your ear and whispered to you about that, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, but it was obstinately silent for me. Part of the reason why is because the audience is expected to identify with Nicholas, a dashing young person of upper-class background whose fall from privilege makes him aware of the divisive social machine in which he is a cog.

I do feel sorry for Nicholas that he’s just now discovering the horrors of industrialism and poverty, and I applaud his attempts to subvert the system, but, all the same, the story of the well-bred young (white) man who single-handedly saves the lower classes from their squalor and whom we are supposed to pity for the awful task he faces comes with some pretty nasty historical and emotional baggage***. Nicholas Nickleby is entertaining, but it isn’t best suited to whisper to comfortable theatregoers that they ought to change the world. It’s best suited to make them feel good about themselves because they’re more like Nicholas and Kate than Ralph Nickleby and Mr. Squeers. And, hey, there’s a giant proscenium arch between us and the poor of London, and, besides, those starving children will come back in the next scene to play different characters, so it’s all OK in the end.

Nicholas Nickleby is an all right play. It has some great funny scenes, like when Nicholas is playing cards with the loathsome Fanny Squeers and her friends, and great nail-biters, like when Ralph finds Sir Hawk attacking his niece. But, though the actors are alive and lively, though the set is grand, though the music comes from an orchestra underneath the stage, this is what Peter Brook calls “dead theatre”: fossilized, preserved.

And, hey, I have nothing against fossils. (You’re talking to someone who wanted to be a paleontologist when she was six.) They’re just not what I have in mind for a pet.

So.

If you’re looking for something to engage you and open your eyes to the world, steer clear of Nicholas Nickleby. If you’re looking for a pleasant, relaxing day at the theatre and a delicious dinner (you get a restaurant voucher if you buy tickets for part one and part two at the same time), you can buy tickets here for the rest of the week. (Use the code VICTORIAN for the dinner deal.) But, as this reviewer concludes, you’ll have a much better time if you go in expecting less.

*One thing I like about Dickens: as an author he seems to have sympathy for even his wickedest characters. What else is Ralph Nickleby but Ebenezer Scrooge before the three Spirits’ visit?

** Also, I admit, because I couldn’t help but remember Brent Carver’s very similar but ever so much more nuanced performance in The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is a script that’s very aware of all the tricky details of trying to “rescue” someone from oppression – how do you preserve the dignity and autonomy of someone who needs your help? Are you just becoming a new, subtler oppressor? How can you even decide whether someone needs your help?, etc. Nicholas Nickleby, naturally, is aware of none of these things, because it’s just not that kind of play. But I couldn’t help feeling leery about it all the same. Sorry.

*** Eg. Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”.