A Tale of Two Cities/ Theatre Royal Brighton
This season the Theatre Royal have dramatised 4 well known novels: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Room With a View, A Tale of Two Cities and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s a challenge to set one art genre, the literary one, on another (the theatrical), but in this superb production it’s more than met. It does help that the Dickens novel is such a cracking one full of incident, colourful characters and with a diving tempo of a plot set in two cities, London and Paris, the latter of which is in turmoil with the storming of the Bastille. In the prologue the epoch is described thus: “These were the worst of times. These were the best of times .”
The action starts in a courtroom scene. Charles Darnay (Jacob Ifan) is on trial suspected of being a French spy in the dockyards of Chatham. A clever but flawed lawyer Sidney Carson (Joseph Timms) exploits the evidential weakness of the prosecution whose main witness Barsad (Sean Murray) turns out to be a cheater at dice and paid informer. Both Darnby and Carton fall for the same woman – Lucie Mintee (Shanaya Rafaat) whose father a doctor (Patrick Romer) also gave evidence to acquit Danray. Dr Minette had been interred in the Bastille without trial. From then the action oscillates between London and Paris where the mob has taken over. Normally in a play there are longeurs where you fidget and look at your watch, here there was none. The cast had to play many roles in a wonderful arrangement of characters from big-hearted cockneys, to nervous bankers and the best of all the drunken clever Carton, beautifully acted and portrayed by Joseph Timms, who has low self-esteem but comes up with a stratagem to save Darnay from the guillotine.
Dickens was also an acute observer of life. So as well as evoking a time of deep unrest on both sides of the Channel, remember Britain had lost the colonies, he describes tavern and low life as well as the arrogance of the French aristocracy. The initials CD in the main character reflects that the writer is never that far from his writings but I did not buy into the theory of an article in the programme that 2 divided countries reflect a writer going through a divorce rather his mastery of prose, character, place depiction and plot. Though not a musical there was music and by the end I felt as moved as I was the first time I saw Les Miserables based on the novel by Victor Hugo.
