Review: A Tale of Two Cities at the Criterion Theatre, Earlsdon

[dutchman]

Chris Arnot reviews A Tale of Two Cities which runs at the Criterion Theatre, Earlsdon, until Saturday October 22



Relations between London and Paris were tense to put it mildly. Londoners were worried about what was happening to their money. No change there then.

But as you know full well, this tale is not about the full English Brexit but the altogether bloodier business of the French Revolution.

These days the bloodshed goes on largely but not entirely in other parts of the world. As a consequence, however, there are still refugees trying to get from Calais to Dover.

Be they the best of times or the worst of times, the times don’t change quite as much as we think.

Still, the events portrayed here happened seventy years before Dickens wrote the book. Apparently he described it as “the best story I have ever written”.

Yet all most of can remember about it are the opening lines and the closing lines when, shortly before putting his head on the block, Sydney Carton proclaims: “It is a far better thing that I do than I have ever done.”

Putting Dickens’s long and complex tales on stage is never easy. But then the Criterion never fights shy of a challenge. Under Jane Railton’s direction, a large cast brought order out of what could easily have been chaos on the opening night.

Sean Glock captured the complexity of Carton’s dissolute self- loathing. Yes, he drinks a fair drop but slurs just enough for us still to hear exactly what he’s saying.

As for his French look-alike, whom he twice saves from execution, Pete Meredith overlays Charles Darnay’s self-conscious worthiness with a telling whiff of priggishness

A bewigged and be-whiskered Keith Railton plays, at different times, a resonantly declaiming Dickens, a ghastly French aristocrat and a judicial “citizen” revolutionary condemning Darnay and many another to death.

Lisa Franklin is lumbered with the role of Lucie Manette, one of those one-dimensional idealised women that Dickens portrayed with such sentimentality.

How much more fun to play Madame Defarge, la tricoteuse terrible.

Cathryn Bowler doesn’t disappoint with a portrayal of vicious vindictiveness. Even when she’s knitting, she gives the impression that she’d like to jab a needle into the jugular under the neck that is about to be severed.

Under Pete Kendall’s management, the backstage crew provide a suitably sinister lighting for the guillotine scenes and manage to get an explosion to go off at the right time.

And talking of time, it was as far better thing to remind ourselves what happens between the opening and the closing lines by watching a stage production rather than ploughing through three hundred and eighty four pages. Again.