Tanika Gupta’s Great Expectations, set in 19th-century India during the British Raj, sounded as if it might be a magnificently arranged marriage, a mix of narrative energies, a cultural hybrid of Dickens’s masterpiece. But the challenge for anyone undertaking an adaptation of this sort is that once you have to make do without the flesh of Dickens’s language, his vim and strangeness, the bones of the surviving narrative tend to creak (all that sentimentality and improbable plot-twisting get unforgivingly exposed).
Gupta’s respectful but slack script involves too much telling: “The English are our puppet masters and if we want a good life, we have to dance to their tune.” And: “The English have kept us down for so long, we don’t believe in ourselves any more.” And: “The white devil treats the black man worse than the brown.” These are repeated truths that need unpacking through action, not in potted lines.
The Royal Exchange’s tremendous scale lends itself to epic, and the designer Rosa Maggiora offers a flexible, sealing-wax red design in the round with a homely shrine and white iron gates garlanded in jasmine. There is no lack of energy in the buoyant cast directed by Pooja Ghai (who herself appeared in the production’s 2011 premiere). Pipli, first encountered as a flighty boy in calico pantaloons, is played with spry charm by Esh Alladi. Cecilia Appiah, as his glacial love interest, Estella, has a diction that would not disgrace our late queen. And as Malik, the convict who improbably becomes Pipli’s secret benefactor, Andrew French shows solidly how violence can have kindness as its flipside. Kindness in Dickens comes as balm, a relief from bullying. And it is this that makes Asif Khan’s benign Jagu affecting as Pipli’s brother-in-law.
But at the heart of the story is Miss Havisham: the half-dressed, abandoned, sepia bride (one shoe off when Pip first meets her in the novel). The notion of converting her into a colonial memsahib, hiding from an Indian sun, is ingenious, and it’s fun to watch Pipli address, in broken English, the old Englishwoman with a broken heart. But Catherine Russell has – a nice fault – too much presence. She is not as ethereal, frightening or mysterious as she needs to be. Miss Havisham is a living ghost, not a histrionic relic.
Towards the end of this three-hour haul, Pipli and his upper-crust white chum Herbert Pocket (dependably played by the dynamic Giles Cooper) startle us by growing, between scenes, identical moustaches – to indicate, presumably, the passing of months. By this stage, you feel the evening has gone on so long that some of the audience might have had time to grow moustaches of their own. But at least the show does not keep Havisham time – the clock has not stopped at 20 minutes to nine.
April De Angelis’s new play Infamous, based on the life of Emma Hamilton (1765-1815), is a romp and a tragedy and could have been written for Caroline and Rose Quentin. Their real-life mother-daughter connection underpins their natural rapport on stage. As Lady Hamilton, Rose Quentin looks the part. George Romney, whose muse Emma was, and who painted her besottedly, would have approved the likeness (even if bright blue eyes replace historical brown). She has a tangle of black curls, a creamy complexion and a languorous yet proactive self-satisfaction (it’s this that eventually propels Emma into Horatio Nelson’s bed). Her white dress looks bridal, as if ever-ready for spontaneous nuptials (Miss Havisham eat your heart out), and Rose Quentin shows that being a femme fatale is an act of will.
The Jermyn Street theatre has been translated by Fotini Dimou, with gilded minimalism, into a salon on a shoestring, with chaise longue, antique desk and dainty inkwell, and as the play opens, Emma is penning a letter of amorous calculation to Nelson, who has just arrived victoriously in Naples. She ardently uses his name three times, to her mother’s disgust (a triple Nelson is better than a half Nelson). As Emma’s wry, working-class mother who cannot hold her plaintively entertaining tongue, Caroline Quentin is perfection, complaining that her carriage journey has rendered her “half woman, half syllabub”. Riad Richie plays Vincenzo, a lovestruck manservant, with comically crisp ardour – Emma disdainfully translates his flowing advances from the Italian to her mother.
In the second half, fortune’s wheel has turned and threatens to crush its former heroine. Caroline Quentin now plays Emma as an old lady and Rose becomes Horatia, Nelson’s sulky illegitimate daughter. All the gilding has gone and the pair shelter in a barn. Emma has long grey hair, a deluded smile and a bottle of liquor, and humiliatingly continues to pose as mythological figures, waving her tattered white shawl around – an attitude(s) problem. There is a trusty feminism to De Angelis’s writing – a sympathetic regard for women. As Emma’s old mother observes: “The world is kinder to boys.” Michael Oakley directs with aplomb.
That Face was written when Polly Stenham was 19 – a formidable achievement. It opened in 2007 at the Royal Court. Director Josh Seymour’s shattering revival is an immersion in the extreme dysfunction of a middle-class family broken by alcoholism. As I was watching, I thought: this play should carry a (mental) health warning (and discovered later that it does). Niamh Cusack is phenomenal as Martha, the ageing mother, swerving terrifyingly between tipsy coquette and unhinged siren in an incestuous liaison with Henry, her lost boy of a son, played with haggard sweetness by Kasper Hilton-Hille, making his debut. Stenham creates unrelentingly shocking tension, and her understanding of vulnerability recalls Tennessee Williams without the mercy of his lyricism. There are no consolations here.
Star ratings, out of five
Great Expectations ★★
Infamous ★★★★
That Face ★★★★
