2:42pm Friday 2nd July 2010
BRISTOL Old Vic Theatre School returned to The Courtyard last week with an impressive production of David Copperfield.
Alastair Cording has done a very skilful job of filleting Dickens’s novel without damaging the narrative structure, though what is left feels necessarily somewhat episodic, a series of small vignettes rather than a cohesive and seamless drama.
That said, it’s an engaging piece of work with plenty of energy and a relentless pace that defies the audience to allow its attention to wander.
Anyone who saw the company’s production of Tess of the D’Urbervilles would have been unsurprised at the ingenuity of the set, which consisted of little more than four upright chairs, cleverly designed so that when two were set side by side they irresistibly suggested the hulk of the Peggotys’ boat house in Yarmouth.
There were a couple of stand-out performances here, notably from Bart Edwards as Mr Creakle and Mr Micawber, a characterisation that had distinct echoes of Simon Callow, and Gemma Lawrence, who pulled off the challenge of playing the sweet and loyal Agnes Wickfield and the imperious and embittered Mrs Steerforth, creating two memorable characters without recourse to props and make-up.
As Uriah Heep, Luke Newberry was as fabulously ‘umble and Heepish as one could have wanted, oozing smarm and sycophancy with conviction.
The only cavil I had, as one with experience of Norfolk, was that the accents adopted by the rustics were way, way too far south and west of the true East Anglian sing-song voice.
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