5 STARS, March 13-17. Alan Long enjoys a wonderful adaptation of Dickens's masterpiece
The play brings vividly to life Charles Dickens’ mid-Victorian novel which centres on Pip, a poor orphan boy who is used by two powerful people to take revenge on the world for their own sufferings.
Pip lives in a village with his grown up sister, Mrs Joe, and her husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. Mrs Joe is an implacably angry ‘parent’ but her harsh treatment is ameliorated by Joe who is humble, kind and protective and ‘ever the best of friends’ with Pip. Pip seems destined for a life of hard labour, poverty and ignorance but is diverted from this fate by interventions from outside the family.
First, he has a terrifying encounter with an escaped convict, Magwitch, whose threats compel him to assist with food and a file that Magwitch uses to detach his chains.
Second, he is taken up by Miss Havisham, a woman of property, who invites him to her grand but decaying house to play with her beautiful adopted daughter, Estella. Unknown to Pip, Miss Havisham is bitterly intent on revenge against men, having been deserted on her wedding day by the man she was to have married. She uses Estella to break men’s hearts, knows that Pip will be beguiled and will fall in love, and that he will be rejected and disappointed as she was on her wedding day.
Third, a lawyer arrives to inform Pip that he has come into a fortune and that his anonymous benefactor intends that he should be removed from ‘his present sphere of life and be brought up as a gentleman’.
Pip moves to London, is given money, new clothes and new sets of companions and attitudes. He feels ashamed of his former life and associations. And in due course comes to feel ashamed of his snobbery. He mistakenly assumes that Miss Havisham is the source of his fortune and that she intends to bring him and Estella together.
Both Pip and Estella have false personae and expectations imposed upon them by their older, richer and more knowing ‘benefactors’. The great skill of the players enables us to see the struggle between the false and true characters, their ambivalence and eventual understanding of what has been done to them. Magwitch and Miss Havisham too see the working out of their plans and expectations – the former appears pleased with the ‘gentleman’ that Pip has become but Miss Havisham lives to experience and feel anguished by, Estella’s coldness and lack of feeling towards her.
As well as deeply serious relationships, emotions and ideas, there is great comedy, particularly in the characters and utterances of Joe Gargery, Pumblechook, Mr Wemmick and Herbert Pocket. The performances of Nichola McAuliffe as Miss Havisham, Sean Aydon as Pip and Isla Carter as Estella (among others) are all outstanding. The use of lamps held by the players on an otherwise darkened stage together with choral music gave a mysterious and haunting quality to many of the scenes. A stimulating and very enjoyable entertainment.
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