Great Expectations E-Book

Charles Dickens.

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A beautifully simple adaptation of one of Dickens's best-loved novels, bringing it thrillingly to life for the stage. When the orphan Pip meets the convict Magwitch in a graveyard and is forced to help him escape, his life takes a series of unexpected turns. Invited to the house of the mysterious Miss Havisham, he falls in love with her adopted daughter, the beautiful but cold-hearted Estella. Then the generosity of an unknown benefactor sends him to London to become a gentleman. But the truth behind his change of fortune, once revealed, is not what Pip expects... Jo Clifford's adaptation of Great Expectations was first performed at Richmond Theatre, London, in 2012, before transferring to the West End. Eminently actable and stageable, this version is also ideal for schools and amateur theatre companies. This edition contains introductions by Simon Callow, Lucinda Dickens Hawksley (great-great-great granddaughter of Charles Dickens) and Clifford herself.

Leseprobe

GREATEXPECTATIONS

adapted from Charles Dickens’s novel by

Jo Clifford

with introductions by the author, Simon Callowand Lucinda Dickens Hawksley

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Adapting a Classic by Jo Clifford

Charles Dickens and his Love of Theatre by Simon Callow

Creating the Original Novel by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley

Production Details

Great Expectations

About The Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Adapting a ClassicJo Clifford

Looking back, it seems like a miracle this play ever came into being.

It actually wasn’t really supposed to be a play at all. I was working with a rather wonderful and rather small Glasgow touring theatre-in-education company called TAG. We wanted to create a new show where actors and dancers performed together and combined dance with the spoken word.

That sort of thing was unheard of in 1988, and to get the project off the ground we thought it would help to attach it to a well-known classic text. I remember reading various classics and turning them down before we all agreed on Great Expectations.

I never meant to dramatise the whole book. That seemed far too difficult. The plan was to create something around the character of Miss Havisham instead.

We started with a week’s workshop with the cast. Most of the actors had never danced on stage; most of the dancers had never spoken on stage. Gregory Nash, the choreographer, would start the day with a dance session – which the actors hated – and then we would take turns to read the book aloud. Which the dancers hated. And then we might improvise a few scenes. Which everyone hated!

But Ian Brown, the director, was supportive and patient and really rather wonderful and eventually things started to gel.

Dickens wrote the book in instalments, which was how we read it to each other; and because many of his first audience were illiterate, that was how they would have experienced it too – a father often reading the latest thrilling instalment to his enthralled family.

That made it very special. All the more special because a young, unknown and utterly wonderful actor called Alan Cumming read Pip with such sensitivity and passion that by the end of the week I knew it was Pip’s story that had to be told.

I knew I had to dramatise the whole book. Impossible or not.

And there were plenty of challenges: I had to make it work for a cast of eight; the show couldn’t last for more than two hours; some of the cast had never acted before; there was going to be a strong element of dance; I’d never worked with dancers before; I’d never adapted a novel before; and I had five weeks before rehearsals began.

No pressure then.

I started the process the same way I treated all my writing: imagining myself to be the characters and the actors portraying them and trying to feel what the characters feel and listen to what they say. And then write it down.

To begin with, it all felt very easy. Great Expectations is full of the most amazing characters who all say the most wonderful things that, with a bit of clever editing, work wonderfully well on stage.

But as the weeks went on, and the play got longer and longer and never seemed anywhere near coming to an end, it began to dawn on me that the problem was there was just too much – too much story, too many characters, too many subplots, too many themes. I had to leave out much of what I wanted to put in; I couldn’t have the wonderful tender friendship between Pip and Herbert Pocket; I couldn’t have Wemmick’s wonderful Aged P. In fact, I couldn’t have all kinds of things that seemed to hold the story together, and on the day before rehearsals began I was well and truly stuck.

Those days we lived in a rented cottage close to Rosslynn Chapel, just on the edge of the woods. I used to go out each morning with my notebook and my dog and type it all up in the afternoon.

That particular day, I remember stopping under a certain tree and sinking down to the ground in utter despair. And then suddenly Jaggers’ last speech popped into my head, apparently from nowhere, and the ragged jaggy pieces of the script fell into place.

So I did go to rehearsals. And I did have a finished script. And every time I go to Rosslynn I say thank you to that tree.

I couldn’t pretend rehearsals were easy. There was a lot I got wrong and had to change. It was hard to figure out what could be said through movement and what needed to be said through words. Liz Ingram, the amazing young dancer playing Miss Havisham, kept saying things with a single gesture that would have taken me a whole page to put into words. Peter Salem, the composer, was writing music as rehearsals went along and Lucy Weller, the designer, was doing the same with the set and everything kept changing. Everybody, except Pip, had to play several parts, and I got into a terrible muddle with the doubling. But then one day Jane Macfarlane, our wonderful cellist, put down her instrument and started to play Biddy. Beautifully. And everything started to fall into place.

Perhaps we were helped by our ‘angels’. We were certainly helped by the cast. Text, choreography, music, acting and design all came together in the most miraculous manner, and when the play opened in Glasgow (on 10th May 1988) it went incredibly well.

So well that in the following year (thanks to the British Council) it toured to Baghdad, Cairo, Alexandria, Colombo, Madras, Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Dhaka. Since then the play has been to Salisbury, Belfast, Newcastle, Sydney, Chicago, Winnipeg, Perth, Pitlochry and all round Scotland (twice) and who knows where else besides.

I’ve rewritten it for larger theatres, and rewritten it for smaller ones. I’ve rewritten it for children, and I’ve rewritten it so part of it could be filmed.

And now I’ve rewritten it all over again for this production, so it can travel to London. Which is the one place where it’s never really been – amazingly, the novel has never been presented as a full-length play in the West End since its original publication.

On all its journeys, the story has always moved people. This is what we must mean, I think, when we talk about ‘genius’: the capacity to reach out and communicate with people through all the barriers of space, culture and time. And Dickens possessed it to an amazing degree.

When I travelled with the play to the Near and Far East, I was constantly amazed by how well informed audiences there were about his work. They seemed to know it better than we do ourselves.

I remember being particularly nervous when I met the matriarch who ran the Dickens Society in Alexandria. And so relieved when it became clear She Approved.

It impressed me particularly deeply in Bangladesh. Dhaka is a cruel city. Its population is swollen by the hordes of the landless: people cut off from their earth, from their family and from their roots. People on the edge. People holding on to life with their fingernails. Side by side with cruel ostentation of the rich.

Dickens must have known this, I thought. This is what he saw. This is what his London must have been like.

Ours too, I suspect, as life gets harder for everybody.

Perhaps his world is not so far away as we may wish to imagine.

I remember when I was a student, we made friends with a solitary lady who lived in the flat below. She worked in a posh hotel kitchen and used to feed us from the leftovers. Us and a huge colony of cats that would gather on her garden wall each day for their afternoon tea. Until the day they never appeared, and we discovered she had died.

She lived alone in a squalid room; after her death it was discovered that the back room of her flat was full of wedding presents, still in their wrapping, that she’d left there since she’d been jilted on the day of her marriage.

There must be so many Miss Havishams in our cities and towns. So many Pips, a prey to vicious snobbery, so many Joes working hard, doing their best. So many abused children. So many abused adults abusing the next generation in turn.

Dickens holds up the mirror for us, in all his inextinguishable vitality, his angry compassion, and his never-altogether-lost hope for a better world. I hope I never lose that hope; and I hope my children never lose theirs either.

I hope they keep their great expectations of what the world can offer them. The expectations they had when they were children, and I first dedicated this play to them, and it moves me that now they are adults that they have them still.

So I want to dedicate the play to them again. And to my first grandchild who, as I write these words, is getting ready to come into the world.

To you too, wherever you are. Whoever you are. I hope I’ve done justice to the wonderful Mr Dickens. And in doing so help strengthen all our personal hopes and expectations of a better world.

© Jo Clifford 2012

Charles Dickens and his Love of TheatreSimon Callow

It is a curious and interesting fact that as Dickens got older, his books got less theatrical. To begin with they were hugely influenced by the stage. He was obsessed by it from an early age: everything about it enchanted him. He even liked attending rehearsals of his cousin’s amateur group. He was just nine when he wrote his first play, (). It featured his sister and friends from neighbouring families; he designed the play, directed it and – naturally – starred in it. After a brief and successful run in the kitchen of his house in Chatham, it disappeared without trace. If his other attempts at playwriting, written in his early twenties, are anything to go by, it may not be too grievous a loss. They are remarkable in Dickens’s output for containing not a single line that bears his stamp. This from a man whose notes to the grocer invariably contain some individual touch, some tell-tale flourish. The problem with the plays is that Dickens was head over heels in love with the theatre of his own time, and he simply tried to reproduce it. He went to the theatre, he said, every day of his life for three years; he memorized large chunks of the plays he saw; he diverted his fellow clerks in the law office where he worked with impersonations of the leading actors of the day. His ear was flawless, and he had real flair, especially for grotesque comedy. His idol was Charles Mathews, an actor-writer who developed a form of theatre that he called monopolylogues, in which he played many different characters in dialogue with each other. Dickens adored these, and learned many of them by heart. Eventually, frustrated by his work in the solicitor’s office, he learned shorthand and worked in the law courts, but this proved even more depressing, and he conceived the idea of becoming an actor.