MLA Has Begun!

Yesterday, I began attending my first conference of the Modern Language Association, which is meeting in New York City this year.

I'll actually be presenting two papers. On Saturday morning (at 8:30 am) I'll be a part of the "Dickens and Resistance" session arranged by the Dickens Society. Diana Archibald put together the session, which also includes talks by Sophie Christman-Lavin, Jolene Zigarovich, and Jonathan Farina.

My paper is called "A Blot in the Theater: Dickens, Macready, and the Quest to 'Revive the Drama'." It deals with how Charles Dickens championed Robert Browning's play A Blot in the 'Scutcheon even as his friend, William Charles Macready was ensuring the play's demise.

Macready got along much better with playwrights if they were dead. He famously revived William Shakespeare's King John with lush period costumes and scenery painted by William Telbin (who based his work on existing medieval buildings). Macready also turned Lord Byron's play Werner into a star vehicle for himself. You can see here a painting of Macready as Werner. (It currently hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum.)

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending another Dickens panel called "Ephemeral Dickens" that was put together by Susan Zieger. Elizabeth Frengel and Janice Carlisle gave a talk called "Disposable Dickens" on researching Dickens ephemera in the archive. One interesting item they brought up was a call slip from the British Library on which a young Dickens had requested the book Greenwich Hospital. That book is a collection of short comic sketches illustrated by George Cruikshank, who went on to illustrate a book of short sketches by Dickens, Sketches by Boz.

Lillian Nayder, who I had heard speak before at a meeting of The Friends of Dickens New York, gave a talk called "Dickensian Jottings" about how Dickens's celebrity has frequently moved his marginal notes to center stage, and allowed his postscripts to replace scripts. I was particularly intrigued by the last talk of the session, in which Rebecca Mitchell spoke on the famous "Dolly Varden" dress inspired by the character in Barnaby Rudge. The style was based on the polonaise dresses popular in the 18th century, but it received a revival in the nineteenth century after it was worn by the actress Augusta Thomson as Dolly Varden in an 1866 stage adaptation of Barnaby Rudge.

The Dolly Varden dress caused quite a craze in the 1870s. Many songs were composed about it, and you can see the cover of some sheet music for one at left. The Franco-Prussian War might have had some affect on the craze, since the latest fashions from Paris where temporarily unavailable. When Dickens died in 1870, though, one of the items in his estate was a painting of Dolly Varden William Powell Frith had done in the 1840s. After that sale, the style became all the rage.

If you're still around on Sunday at noon, one of the last sessions of the MLA conference will be "Revolutionary States: George Bernard Shaw, 1918." Jennifer Buckley is presiding, and I'll be giving a second paper called "Staging Immortality in 1918: Bernard Shaw and Luigi Antonelli." The paper takes a comparative approach to dramatic responses to the end of World War I and the emergence of state communism, examining Shaw's Back to Methuselah and the Italian playwright Luigi Antonelli's A Man Confronts Himself.

I gave a similar talk at the Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore in 2014, but did some new research that has changed the focus of my comparison. I will be joined by Virginia Costello talking about Shaw and Emma Goldman, Martin Meisel talking about Shaw and Sean O'Casey, and Ellen Dolgin talking about Shaw and J.M. Barrie. Hope to see you there!

Anderson's Carol

I just watched the 1954 television version of A Christmas Carol adapted by the playwright Maxwell Anderson.

You would think I would have been familiar with it already. I'm a big fan of the works of Charles Dickens, and I even penned my own stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which was done in 2007.

However, I had never seen this version until I came across it on the blog Laughing Academy. CBS originally ran the hour-long program the night before Christmas Eve, sponsored by Chrysler, which comically interrupted the story to try to sell station wagons to viewers.

The version stars Fredric March as Scrooge and Basil Rathbone as Marley's Ghost, but I was more interested in the adapter. Maxwell Anderson was no mere hack. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1933 for Both Your Houses. I remember him more for his 1948 play Anne of a Thousand Days. (When I was in middle school, I played a choir boy in a production of it at the University of West Florida.)

Anderson is credited with writing both the adaptation and the lyrics, which might seem odd, until you remember that he penned the lyrics for the Kurt Weill musical Knickerbocker Holiday, including the hit "September Song":

                    But it's a long, long while from May to December
                    And the days grow short when you reach September
                    And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
                    And I haven't got time for the waiting game…

Yes, this adaptation is a musical, and though not every number is a "September Song," some of the lyrics aren't bad, including those for the opening carol, "On This Darkest Day of Winter."

The most interesting aspect of Anderson's script is the use of double casting. Belle also plays the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Fred is also the Ghost of Christmas Present. A stuffed blackbird in Scrooge's apartments (an allusion to Grip in Barnaby Rudge perhaps?) then becomes the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

This adaptation definitely feels like something from the early 1950s. It's not brilliant, but it is fun, and it's only an hour long, so if you're looking for a short adaptation of the classic story, it's worth watching.

Barnaby Rudge

I wrote a review of last year's production of Barnaby Rudge in Portsmouth, but the review never ran. In honor of the 201st birthday of Charles Dickens, I thought I'd post it to the blog:

 

Barnaby Rudge, adapted for the stage and directed by Eileen Warren Norris: Alchemy Theatre in association with the Kings Theatre, Portsmouth. 9-11 August 2012.

            Tensions involving religious minorities are running high, demagoguing politicians are useless or worse than useless, and the urban poor rise up in violent riots, destroying the property of the innocent and burning themselves out as a seemingly uncaring government finally stamps out the remains of the upheaval.

            That's the plot of Barnaby Rudge, not a comment on the recent unrest in Britain's cities. But Eileen Warren Norris's stage adaptation of the novel at Kings Theatre in Portsmouth was clearly aware of parallels between 2011's headlines and the riots of 1780. Actors were still costumed in clothes suggestive of the eighteenth century, the language was largely that of Dickens, and no characters sported sunglasses or received text messages on stage, as they sometimes do in other 'updated' classics. That would have been unnecessary. The play related the action to the present without having to belabor the point.

            One factor that aided in this respect was the youthfulness of the cast. Simon Tappertit (played by Aaron Holdaway) and his fellow apprentice hooligans were age-appropriate. An advantage of drawing much of the cast from young people in the community was that the riot scenes seemed to burst with youthful enthusiasm. As teenagers settled old scores and helped themselves to loot, they put a mirror up to a part of human nature that hasn't changed much in the twenty-first century.

            And it was the riot scenes that stood out most in this production. The lighting design by Phil Hanley and set devised by Michael Major helped to create a sense of anarchy and destruction during these moments. The ensemble, though clearly mixed in background and training, rose to the occasion and performed admirably when carrying out complex stage choreography portraying the devastation of London.

            This adaptation was openly theatrical, including direct address to the audience, often accompanied by a wink and a nod. This was particularly useful in relating large chunks of exposition and in introducing who was playing which character. In the opening and closing, the performers were clearly acknowledged as actors putting on a show, but in the heart of the play, they were allowed to fully embody their characters and engage the audience in the story.

            In keeping with this, Barnaby's raven, Grip, began as a very simple puppet that merely suggested a raven, but later became a more realistic raven puppet. Adam Brown played Barnaby and supplied the voice of Grip, choosing to perform both characters in a similar mad manner. Adhering to the theatrical nature of the production, he did not attempt any ventriloquism.

            Roger Wallsgrove was delightfully pompous as Sir John Chester, and I rather regretted the duel scene being cut, as it would have been nice to see him get his just desserts. However, Norris was probably wise to wrap up an already lengthy production after the climactic riots had ended and Barnaby had been pardoned.

            Other strong performances included that of Kevin Brewer, who played Hugh, and that of Henry Ostler, who was wonderfully funny as the hangman Dennis. The amateur cast sometimes lacked polish, but rarely enthusiasm, and it was a pleasure to see them bring one of the Inimitable's least performed novels to life on the stage.