It is part of the vanity of our age that we assume all works of art are ultimately about us. Matthew Dunster’s adaptation of Dickens’ 1859 French Revolution novel is set in a world of refugee camps, border police and video footage of popular demos. The problem is that Dickens’ novel is far too complex to be reinterpreted as a simple protest against the manifold injustices of the modern migration crisis.
Timothy Sheader’s production and Fly Davis’s design set the tone by confronting us with three shipping containers that serve variously as prisons, Parisian wine shops, parlours and aristocratic palaces. Aside from suffering a first-night technical hitch, they impede the flow of the action. They also distract us from the fact that Dickens’s novel is less a political pamphlet than a resurrection myth. Dr Manette is reborn after 18 years in the Bastille, and Sydney Carton, through an act of heroic self-sacrifice while a secret agent – omitted by Dunster – feigns death in order to come to life again. This is the theme that knits together a novel which, although it records the tyranny that provoked the violence of the Terror, is really about the possibility of moral regeneration.
This version, mixing modern and 18th-century costume, tries to have the best of both worlds by combining Dickens’ narrative with images of the refugee camp at Sangatte: the result is a fearful muddle. The production’s most radical feature is to treat the play more as an ensemble piece than a star vehicle and it brings together a multiracial cast. The fact that Charles Darnay and his double, Sydney Carton, are played by actors of different colour may raise a few eyebrows, but makes an important statement. What matters is that the roles are well played by Jude Owusu and Nicholas Karimi.
Patrick Driver lends Dr Manette a resolute dignity, Marième Diouf does all she can as his daughter, Lucie, whom Dickens forgot to characterise, and there is striking support from Kevork Malikyan, Claire-Louise Cordwell and Francesca Mills. But, in attempting to treat Dickens as a modern polemicist, Dunster wilfully ignores George Orwell’s point that “in every attack upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure”.
•At Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London, until 5 August. Box office: 0844-826 4242.
