Post by artea on Apr 26, 2024 14:22:28 GMT
Another dud from Rufus Norris. Far too much of it is not just incessantly effing but incessantly "literally" effing. It's like being being harangued for nearly 2 hours by a big blood red dress called Charlotte. Sometimes Charlotte is given someone else to harangue. These others might as well not be there. Charlotte doesn't need them. She tells them as much. It's all very wearing. I couldn't have cared less. No wonder the brother is drunk out of his head. And yet ... however ... there is one scene of brilliance which has nothing to do with the rest of the play tonally or otherwise: the clippety-cloppety carriage journey from Keighley to London (17 hours we're told) which starts Act 2. It's a light interlude before the haranguing starts up again but it's theatrically imaginative, beautifully and simply written, directed and acted, so full of small details and very, very funny. I thought it would have made a wonderful way in to a stage adaptation of a picaresque novel from C18 such as Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. I know this is an eccentric notion now and will never happen in 2024+ at the NT, but there was a time when C19 Nicholas Nickleby could provide a big theatrical success. And it would be an awful lot more worthwhile than Underdog the other other Brontë. So, not for me then.