PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (Thur 3-Sat 12 Nov)

MUSICAL THEATRE “Facts! Facts! Facts!” chant the urchins at Mr Gradgrind’s joyless school. “Work! Work! Work!” cry the employees of Mr Bounderby’s mill. “We must hold onto our dreams!” sing Tom and Lou, Gradgrind’s hapless kids. “In these hard times... let your imagination soar,” agree the chorus. Terrible flashbacks to schoolkids singing 'Food, Glorious Food' hang over any Dickens musical. Mercifully this evening is closer in spirit to 'Les Miserables' than 'Oliver!' It’s a pretty valiant attempt to scrunch 400 pages of Victorian misery into a couple of hours of theatre.

Maybe the first half is a tad bloated and amorphous. We’ve hardly been introduced to one set of characters before they’ve surrendered the stage to a different sub-plot. But this pays off after the interval, when the threads coalesce into one convincingly Dickensian tableau after another. The luckless Stephen Blackpool (Jonathan Mulquin) – fired and suspected of robbery in Act I – marches back into town to clear his name, and...er...falls down a mineshaft. His sentimental death throes (convulsing impressively) may be the best bit of acting we see all evening.

But the whole cast is terrific. Eliot Chapman’s Gradgrind holds the show together: resisting any temptation to fall into Scroogy caricature, he convinces us that that fact-based utilitarianism is something a sensible fellow could believe in. Bounderby (Andy McKeane) is a total and utter caricature, but he’s meant to be –  the original Monty Python Yorkshireman, claiming to have been brought up in a ditch and blustering deliciously when he’s exposed as an old fraud. When Oliver Lynes' killingly funny bored cad Harthouse arrives, he briefly threatens to steal the show as well as Lou Gradgrind’s heart. And Daniel Wilde convincingly maps Tom’s descent from perfect elder brother to dissolute gambler.

But just possibly the evening belongs to Stephanie Racine as Mrs Sparsit, the officious busybody who spends Act II trying to prove that Lou’s cheating on Bounderby with Harthouse. (Yes, Dickens really is a lot like 'Eastenders'.) The ensemble set-piece when she’s rendered speechless while trying to reveal the non existent affair is comic character acting of a pretty high order.

As a matter of fact, this reviewer has never read 'Hard Times', but this production renders the multi-pronged plot crystal clear. It also makes you feel you should get around to reading the book... which is the best compliment any adaptation could wish for. (Andrew Rilstone)

Copyright Andrew Rilstone 2011

Picture: Graham Burke