Dickens and Drama

Through examination of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby (1980), this chapter points to historically specific performance styles and culture’s processing of the past as two key issues in the understanding of how adaptation works. The aim is to anticipate what version of Britain’s great author might persist into the twenty-first century. From the outset, Dickens was adapted for the stage; his novels were consumed through adaptation, collective readings, reading aloud. It is as if Dickens wrote precisely for dramatic adaptation. But as the material conditions of performance change, as aesthetic tastes alter and patterns of consumption evolve, will important aesthetic and theatrical elements in Dickens be tamed or left behind? Forty years ago, the RSC production treated Dickens as a classical text, for performance by classical actors. But such an approach is no longer possible. What is argued is that an evolution in acting styles, and a tendency towards chastisement of the past, prevents us from fully opening onto the radical nature and Otherness of Dickens’s work.