Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Few would dispute that Shakespeare and Dickens represent the crowning glories of English writing for the stage and page. Shakespeare is constantly produced and Dickens has provided the material for the musical Oliver! (based on Oliver Twist), the RSC’s epic adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby and countless versions of A Christmas Carol.

It is not a new idea to present these writers onstage, featuring small casts. At the most extreme end, both Patrick Stewart and Jefferson Mays offered solo presentations of Carol. The Bedlam and Fiasco Theater companies made their reputations in part by offering Shakespeare with small casts. This said, I think the recent weeks may have been the first time mini-versions of works by both – Othello and David Copperfield – played at the same time.

One worked, one didn’t.

Despite its name, the Guildford Shakespeare Company offered us the Dickens in a production at 59 East 59th Street with three players – Eddy Payne, Luke Barton and Louise Beresford – playing the many characters of David Copperfield – under the direction of Abigail Pickard Price. Last year, I’m told, the same company did very well with an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I wish I had seen it. Copperfield was a fizzle.

Much of that may have to do with problems in the book. The title character suffers from a feature common to many autobiographic characters – he is passive. He doesn’t drive events. Events happen to him. This makes him a less-than-compelling presence. Most of the novel is him describing a range of broadly drawn figures he encounters, all of whom are more interesting than he is. Dickens gets away with it in the novel, but a play whose central character doesn’t drive the action generally doesn’t work well, and this one doesn’t. And the famous characters are most slighted, too, being invoked too briefly to make much of an impression.

It is one of the curiosities of Othello that the play is not named after its most driven character. That, of course, would be Iago, who, for motives that audiences have been arguing forever, has decided to trick Othello into destroying himself. In 1949, José Limón choreographed The Moor’s Pavane, a ballet version of the play for four dancers and a handkerchief set to music adapted from Henry Purcell. For the Bedlam Theater Company, director Eric Tucker (minus the Purcell) also told the story with four performers, including Tucker himself as a fiercely effective Iago. His Iago reminded me of a smalltown American businessman who, at the corner bar, would probably stand everyone to a round of drinks while he was figuring out how to cheat them in real estate while seducing their daughters. Ryan Quinn was an intense and combustible Othello. Susannah Hoffman was mostly Desdemona, and Susannah Millonzi was mostly Emilia; they both mastered the feat of fully investing in their primary roles without shortchanging their alternate ones. Having sat through a curiously sedate Othello on Broadway a couple of seasons back, it was a pleasure to be reminded how disturbing Othello can be. It was a pleasure, too, to see a production of a classic by Tucker that was on a par with the productions of Saint Joan and Sense and Sensibility that made his reputation. His past adaptations have been restaged around the country. I hope people outside New York get a chance to see this.