Little Nell
The Guardian,
Simon
Gray’s new play is a puzzle. It was ‘inspired’ by Claire Tomalin’s marvellous
book about the clandestine, 13-year love affair between Charles Dickens and
Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman. But, while Gray does an expert professional
job and Peter Hall’s production is finely acted, it is hard to say precisely
what theatricalisation of the book adds to a now familiar story.
Structurally,
Gray’s chief motivation is to view the Ternan-Dickens affair through the eyes
of the next generation. Seizing on a minor but crucial incident in Tomalin’s
book. He shows Geoffrey Robinson, Nelly’s son by her headmaster husband,
visiting Sir Henry Dickens, one of the great writer’s 10 children, in his legal
chambers in 1922. Robinson’s mission is to discover whether his mother was the
writer’s mistress. He not only learns that she was but also that she lied to
her husband and children
The
process starts in 1857 when the 45-year-old Dickens meets 17-year-old Nelly in
Doncaster and camouflages his sexual fascination under a mock avuncularity. It continues
with Dickens setting up Nelly in homes in Slough and Peckham while remaining an
icon of Victorian domesticity. And the lies, Gray implies, even start to infect
the relationship between the two lovers.
All
this is of some interest. But Gray’s play only really achieves an independent
life in the strange scenes between the mature children of Nelly and Dickens. Her
son, by a savage irony a bookseller in Slough, is the more visibly damaged in
that he discovers he never really knew his mother. But Sir Henry Dickens,
though long familiar with the facts, can never quite banish the memory of the
banshee wails of his own discarded mother. If any moral emerges, it is that
genius exacts a terrible price on all those with whom it comes into contact.
Running
a mere 90 minutes, Gray’s play is informative, intelligent but somewhat lacking
in the total gesture of drama. The main pleasure comes from watching a very
good series of actors at work. Tim Pigott-Smith, from his first entry as
Robinson, suggests a man uneasy inside his own skin. His speech is full of
stammering hesitancy and the persistent thrusting of his left hand into his
jacket pocket suggests creeping neurosis. Barry Stanton is equally remarkable
as Sir Henry Dickens. His portly bearing and resonant voice suggest a clubman authority
which slowly cracks to reveal genuine suffering from the guilt.
Michael
Pennington possibly had the hardest task in playing Dickens in that he has to
avoid making him seem a hypocritical villain: something Pennington does by
subtly suggesting that Dickens found in Nelly solace for his aching heart
rather than simply a sensual refuge. And Loo Brealey shrewdly suggests that,
while Nelly may have started out as a child lover playfully tugging at Dickens’s
beard, she matured into a woman who began to understand the desperate price she
has paid.
The
production get the Peter Hall Company’s new start off to a decent start. But I still
can’t help hungering for something more original. Tomalin’s book was a
scrupulous piece of feminist investigation that revealed a lot about the role
of women in 19th century
Whatsonstage.com,
It’s
five years since Peter Hall inaugurated his summer seasons at
In
a season which also offers Shaw’s Pygmalion – the rather pert young flower girl
who turns Professor Higgins’ head (at least in the film; Hall’s revival;
augmented by extra scenes Shaw wrote for the 1938 film, reverts to Shaw’s
instructions and give them no such romantic outcome) – Gray’s companion head
turner, Ellen Ternan emerges as just as much a victim of an older man’s fancy
if collusive with it.
‘Nell’,
or Little Mouse as he affectionately called her proved to be a redoubtable muse
for Dickens – a Little Nell, killed off in The Old Curiosity Shop, resurrected.
That she was also the love of his life, who remained at his side for 13 years,
did not stop him from keeping her hidden, in darkest
There
have been several stage attempts in recent years to investigate Dickens, the
man behind the work. Miriam Margolyes brought a subtle feminist critique to her
one-woman show celebrating Dickens’ women. Gray’s Little Nell – inspired by
Claire Tomalin’s bestseller, The Invisible Woman – is a far more affectionate
though not uncritical exploration.
Gray
makes a fine job of gently revealing Dickens’ hypocrisies, strange idealism
complex and the destructive effects of adultery through the painful enquiries
made by Tim Pigott-Smith’s halting, World War One scarred Geoffrey Robinson,
Ellen’s son by a later marriage and his distantly related relative, Barry
Stanton’s avuncular lawyer, Dicken’s natural son. In a cast that includes Tony
Haygarth (as Ellen’s confidante, the Rev Benham) and Michael Pennington as a wonderfully
bewhiskered and flamboyantly self-deceiving Charles Dickens, comparative newcomer
Loo Brealey shines as the eponymous Nell, managing the remarkable feat of both
looking an innocent 17 (when Dickens ‘seduced’ her) and a later, more agonised
wife of the failed headmaster husband George Robinson, riddled by the guilt of
her 13-year affair with the novelist.
Barely
90 minutes in length, Little Nell’s qualities are gentle but cumulative.
Lighting designer Peter Mumford, designer Simon Higlett, who suggests park,
Victorian living room and lawyer’s office all in one, and costume designer
Christopher Woods wreathe the production in period glow while Hall directs with
an elegiac touch. Gray, known in his youth for his bile, may have written more
biting encounters. He’s seldom written one more simply affecting that still
manages to contain the grit of truth.
Timesonline,
Imagine
you’ve grown up trusting your mother. Imagine you discover after her death that
not only was she ten years older than she claimed, but also that she had been
the long-term mistress of the great writer who, she said, had made an innocent
fuss of her when she was a child. You’ve just imagined the predicament of Tim
Pigott-Smith’s Geoffrey Robinson when he comes to Charles Dickens’s son, Barry
Stanton’s Sir Henry Dickens, QC, with painful truths to learn.
In
1990 Claire Tomalin published The Invisible woman, a brilliant account of the
45-year-old Dickens’s seduction of and subsequent affair with a 17-year-old
actress called Nelly Ternan, and her book has inspire Simon Gray to rework the
same story. You can see why it appealed to a dramatist always fascinated by
dark, difficult secrets and strange, subtle betrayals. As staged by Peter Hall
as the opener to his annual season in
Funnily
enough, it’s the encounter with Dickens junior in 1922 that has the emotional
texture that the constant flashbacks to the 1860s never acquire. It’s agonising
for the secondhand bookseller from Slough, which is what Pigott-Smith’s pale,
stammering Robinson is, to ask the confident lawyer for information about his mother,
and, when he gets the answer, you watch him
move from bewilderment and embarrassed confusion to helpless rage: “What
manner of man was this Charles Dickens?” that’s one of the questions with which
Gray tantalises us. Yes, Dickens seems to have fallen deeply in love with a
girl who had the beauty and brightness that his dull, detested wife lacked. And,
yes, you can understand why Nelly submits, like a vole trapped in the
headlights, to the energy, the charm, the sheer imaginative dazzle of Pennington’s
excellent Dickens. But if she is his victim, her eventual husband and children
are victims. Victorian guilt transforms her into a lifelong liar who leaves her
son a disillusioned mess – and, since she feels unworthy to be a vicar’s wife,
she marries a man who unwillingly, unhappily renounces the Church for
schoolmastering.
What
Gray doesn’t sufficiently do is use his playwright’s freedom to speculate about
the evolution of an affair that did, after all, last 13 years. There are
suggestions, no more, that Nelly resented as well as accepted her status. There’s
the tiniest hint of babies abandoned or dead. We also see her enraged by
something presumably meant to provide an ironic parallel with her own
situation: Dickens habit of acting out Bill Syke’s murder of
Is
it enough to dramatise the contradictions of their love? Not quite.
The Stage,
It was
Oscar Wilde who said you would need a heart of stone not to laugh at Little
Nell’s death scene in The Old Curiosity Shop. Well, you would need that
self-same heart to suppress a chuckle or two at the irony at the centre of
Simon Gray’s absorbing new play. For Charles Dickens himself, viewed by his
contemporaries as the greatest moralist of his time, had the hots for an
actress young enough to be his daughter. The fact that her name was also Nelly
only adds to the curiosity.
The play, premiered at the start of
the Peter Hall Company summer season at the Theatre Royal,
In the leading roles, Michael
Pennington makes Dickens a dangerously flawed figure in private but a giant in
public, while Loo Brealey, as Nelly, moves impressively from sweet if knowing
innocence to inner strength. There is excellent support, too, from Tim
Pigott-Smith and Barry Stanton as their damaged descendants.
The British Theatre
Guide,
Simon
Gray’s new play, Little Nell, has the weighty authority of a classic. Inspired by
Claire Tomalin’s book The Invisible Woman: the Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles
Dickens, the play is a fascinating study of what Gray calls “the sapping
logistics of adultery”. Gray’s multi-layered script masterfully shifts its
focus between the uncomfortable and clandestine affair between 45 year old Dickens
and 17 year old actress, Nelly Ternan, and the long-lasting implications the affair
was to have upon dickens’ sons, sixty-five years later.
The
play is beautifully staged by the Peter Hall Company, benefiting from Simon
Higlett’s imposing set, Peter Mumford’s impressive lighting and a pitch perfect
cast.
Barry
Stanton is memorable as Sir Henry Dickens. He is at first a thoroughly grounded
man; respectable; successful; at ease in the leather and mahogany of his
office. By contrast, Tim Pigott-Smith’s affecting Geoffrey Robinson appears
nervous, apologetic and insecure. The two men peel back the layers of their
past revealing the uneasy legacy of their father’s infidelity, and there is a
steady blurring of the distinctions between them. Finally they come to see that
they have in common more than they at first thought. Both men give masterful
performances, not least in the unguarded emotion of their final scene.
Loo
Brealey is a captivating Nelly. Her initial, uncomplicated naiveté makes for an
unbearable seduction scene and her increasing emotional maturity throughout the
play, and her dissatisfaction with her sustained anonymity, are deeply
affecting.
Michael
Pennington is deeply convincing as Charles Dickens, every bit the Victorian
celebrity: puffed-up, self-assured, and easily able to use his status to
ingratiate himself with Nelly. He manipulates, condescends and humiliates her
in order to seduce her and then to sustain the affair. Gray makes the lightest
suggestion of what he refers to as Dickens’ “sexual lunacy”, concocting a
playful seduction, laden with uncomfortable innuendo: Nelly tugs at Dickens’
beard with her teeth and exclaims, “What are we to do? As I haven’t a beard to
eat”, to which he replies, “There’s not a part of you that I don’t intend to
eat”.
After
they have consummated their relationship, Dickens provides Nelly a towel he has
anticipated she might need. Here Pennington lends Dickens’ a smug pretence of
tenderness, setting off this most pre-meditated exploitation. This, coupled
with Brealey’s youthful bewilderment and naive acquiescence, has a gloriously
uneasy impact.
Edward
Bennett is a tortured and pitiful George Robinson, Nelly’s husband, duped into
believing in his wife’s respectability, but frequently torn apart by his
suspicions. Tony Haygarth is a wonderful Reverend Benham, his easy naturalism
seducing Nelly into confessing her secret in lovely Victorian euphemism:
admitting that she had “honoured” and “served” Dickens over many a year.
Little
Nell is a fascinating and well-crafted story which cracks the veneer of the
Victorian middle classes, and shatters the historical mistruth of the sanctity
of Victorian marriage. Loo Brealey gets to the heart of Nelly’s dogged
determination to suppress her sense of injustice and instead tolerate her lot. In
this way, the production honours another Victorian institution: that a woman
should know her place. She may ultimately have come to voice her anguish at her
social invisibility, but Nelly Ternan nevertheless endured it to the very end,
and this private torment is abundantly clear in Brealey’s astounding
performance.
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