Andersen's English by Sebastian Barry at Library Theatre, Manchester
Renowned touring theatre company Out of Joint are reunited with award-winning Irish writer Sebastian Barry for this new play about that nineteenth-century colossus of fiction Charles Dickens.
The action takes place during the summer of 1857 when fellow celebrity writer Hans Christian Andersen makes an unexpected and interminable visit to Dickens’ new home in Kent. The irritation caused in the household by the Dane’s eccentric and childlike behaviour is exacerbated by his poor grasp of English. Their visitor however is delighted to find himself surrounded by a huge ménage of larger-than-life characters and is oblivious to increasing undercurrents of tension.
This production is a dream meeting of fine writer, superlative cast and top notch production. The dialogue has the satisfying style and literariness of a sketch by Boz himself, yet avoids seeming stilted or awkward because of the skilful delivery of great actors like David Rintoul and Niamh Cusack.
Rintoul’s self-centred and self-dramatising Dickens is alive with passion and vitality, yet has a complete want of empathy for those around him (declaring that a “play is more real than real life”), casually wrecking his loved ones’ lives like a moustache-twirling villain in a melodrama.
Niamh Cusack gains all our sympathy as his worn-out wife Catherine. Only just recovering from a career of constant childbirth, she finds her role in the household usurped by her younger sister, her elder children being sent away, and her husband planning a separation. Cusack matches Rintoul for ardour but is given additional opportunities for pathos, and seizes them.
Danny Sapani plays overgrown schoolboy Andersen as a blundering but well-meaning innocent all unconscious of the emotional atrocities surrounding him. Although Barry’s intention was presumably to shine a new light on Dickens’ life by refracting it through the prism of Anderson’s eyes, somehow the famous Hans becomes overshadowed by bewitching little Irish housemaid Aggie, charmingly rendered by Lisa Kerr. An Anglo-Hibernian theme creeps more and more into the narrative, underscored by those sentimental Thomas Moore songs so beloved of the Victorians.
Barry has written a compelling narrative and wonderfully rounded characters, and director Max Stafford-Clark brings them exuberantly to the stage with a variety of techniques ranging from puppetry to singing.
Lucy Osborne’s set is cluttered with all the impedimenta of a traditional Victorian home, but works brilliantly with Tim Bray’s lighting to evoke scenes as diverse as a hilltop ramble, a moonlit fishing expedition, an impromptu cricket match and the Crystal Palace.
Great literary biographies invoke the spirit of an author’s work as well as creating a living portrait of their subject. Sebastian Barry illuminates his subject, Dickens, by turning Dickens into a character of Dickensian proportions, and in the process becomes himself a writer of Dickensian dimensions.
Andersen’s English is on at Manchester Library Theatre until Saturday 6 March 2010 and then touring
Prices: £13.00-£18.00 (concessions available)
Eves: Mon-Thurs @ 7.30pm; Fri & Sat @ 8pm
Matinees: Thurs & Sat @ 3pm
Box Office: 0161 236 7110
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