Critical Overview
The original story of Nicholas Nickleby was produced in serial form and printed in twenty monthly parts. It was so popular that Dickens had to issue a proclamation threatening ‘‘summary and terrible reprisal’’ for those who might publish the story under another name. It was his most popular novel to date, and it sold 50,000 copies in short order. When Dickens became even more popular, he performed readings from Nickleby, to audiences that "roared" with approval.
Edgar was by no means the first playwright to stage an adaptation of the Dickens novel. In fact, Dickens himself attended the first dramatization, adapted by Edward Stirling and produced by Frederick Yates in London at the Adelphi Theatre in 1838. The production ran for over one hundred performances, and Dickens deemed it "admirably done in every respect.’’ Another production, by William Moncrieff in 1839, did not earn his approval because it revealed information that had not yet come out in Dickens' s serialized story of Nicholas—that Smike was Ralph's son. For this breach, Dickens retaliated in a subsequent serial issue: in chapter 48, Dickens attacks dramatists who transcribe a work from one medium or language to another with little change and then take credit (and profit) for the result. David Edgar, adapting the Dickens piece a century and a half later, himself felt criticized for taking the "easy way'' of adaptation. In a 1980 article for the Times (as quoted in Plays from the Contemporary British Theater), Edgar wrote, "I met the full force of the prejudice that has always existed against the transformation of literature from one medium to another. My work, I was told, had ceased to be 'original.' It was assumed that I was only doing it for the money, or that I was 'marking time' while I developed a 'proper idea.'’’ Edgar wants his work to be judged as a real play, and his contemporary critics have done just that.
David Edgar worked closely with two talented directors, Trevor Nunn and John Caird, as well as forty-five members of the cast of the original Royal Shakespeare Company production in developing the script for the dramatic version of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. The group read the novel together and then rehearsed it scene by scene, with Edgar writing and rewriting the play as the ideas evolved among a rather disparate group of talented artists, including actors, directors, and writer. As Edgar acknowledged, it was a collaborative effort: ‘‘It's not a personal statement; it's Dickens having been passed through a filter of 45 people and written down by me.’’ The production ran at the Aldwych Theatre for six weeks, followed in 1981 with two equally successful runs of six weeks each, with audiences often giving fifteen-minute standing ovations. The play won the Society of West End Theatres award for best play, even though the London reviews generally were mixed. Michael Billington of the Guardian questioned the judiciousness of adapting a Dickens novel, commenting, ‘‘the RSC has come up with a perverse and needless triumph: a great deal of skill and imagination has been expended on the creation of something that gains only marginally, if at all, from being seen rather than read. Undeniably this Nicholas Nickleby has been done well. My question is: should it have been done at all?’’ Some reviewers found the play desultory and over-long, while Bernard Levin of the Sunday Times proclaimed that London had never seen anything ‘‘so richly joyous. .. . life-enhancing, yea-saying and fecund, so.... Dickensian.’’ The New York Broadway production ran for fourteen weeks and won the...
(This entire section contains 796 words.)
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Antoinette Perry ("Tony'') Award and the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for best play in 1982. The production was filmed for television in 1983 by director Jim Goddard and produced by Colin Callender. This made-for-television version boasts Peter Ustinov as host, butTime reviewer Richard Corliss complained that the filming left the viewer feeling as though he has just seen "a pageant through a peephole'' because television cannot reproduce the spectacle of the stage. Nevertheless, the televised version of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby won an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1983. Although the Edgar version seemed to "belong" to the Royal Shakespeare Company of London, the Great Lakes Shakespeare Company of Cleveland, Ohio, produced a very successful show in 1982. A1985 revival by the Royal Shakespeare Company (with a different cast) once again demanded top ticket prices of one hundred dollars and once again convinced audiences, according to a Time review by William A. Henry III in 1986, that ‘‘Nickleby may be the most jubilant and thrilling experience to be had in a theater.’’ Expensive and exhausting both to produce and to watch, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby nonetheless stands as a triumph of socially uplifting theater.