Dickens Unplugged at the Comedy Theatre

Dickens Unplugged at the Comedy Theatre

21 July, 2008
by: Jimmy

This review was going to begin with one of those awful wonk-speak clichés, 'In spite of my misgiving this was quite enjoyable...' and I was going to natter on about my initial misgivings about reducing Dickens' collected work to an hour and half of country songs and slapstick, before slyly confessing 'but actually this is kinda fun'. Or at least that's roughly how I felt last night as I toppled into the usual catatonia on my way back down the District Line. Problem is this morning I find I have virtually no memory of last night's musical comedy at all. And in fact I realise my feelings of cheeriness were entirely related to the improvement in form of my Euro 2008 Fantasy Team. By contrast with my Lukas Podolski inspired wunderband, Adam Long's Dickens Unplugged at the Comedy Theatre is relentlessly mediocre, and in spite of seeming to move with zip, deeply wearisome.

Long is best known as the founder of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and the abridged version of Shakespeare's complete works (Othello as a rap song and the like) had a junket of inventive silliness sadly absent from this production. A great deal, for example, was made of Dickens' personal performances of the 'bludgeoning scene from Oliver' triggering a sort of inadvertent meta-theatre as the same, not especially amusing joke, was revisited half a dozen times, on each occasion with less wit. Indeed the insertion of a dull biography of Dickens himself between each of his major works (presumably to lend the production some sort of internal narrative) shows up the deep lack of faith this production has in its audience's knowledge of the work being riffed about. With their audience's ignorance therefore assumed from the outset, the basis for the show's jokes vanishes (after all, how do you make jokes about stories no-one remembers? Only, it seems, by suggesting behind each title, lie works that consist of streams of narrative cliché).

For the most part the show ends up on this one note joke, only ventured away from by the cast's occasional cumbersome attempts to comically deconstruct their own barely comic summaries. These sections are about as edifying as listening to your parents-in-law make tongue-in-cheek private jokes. Baffling? Tick. Embarrassing? Tick. Unwarrantedly smiley? Tick. Funny? ... did I mention the bludgeoning scene?

With little comic insight into any of the stories themselves (scarcely surprisingly given Long admits to having never read Bleak House or Hard Times in his own programme notes) the whole show seems misguided, cynical and tedious, not to say pointless. One for the tourists, avoid.

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Jimmy