Nicholas Nickleby - Theatre Adaptation

Theatre Adaptation

The novel has been adapted for stage, film or television at least seven times. Perhaps the most extraordinary version (from playwright David Edgar) was created in 1980 when a large-scale stage production of the novel was performed in the West End by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was a theatrical experience which lasted more than ten hours (counting intermissions and a dinner break – the actual playing time was approximately eight-and-a-half hours). The production received both critical and popular acclaim. All of the actors played multiple roles because of the huge number of characters, except for Roger Rees, who played Nicholas and David Threlfall who played Smike (due to the large amount of time they were on stage). The play moved to Broadway in 1981. In 1982 the RSC had the show recorded as three two-hour and one three-hour episodes for Channel 4, where it became the channel's first drama. In 1983, it was shown on television in the United States, where it won an Emmy Award for Best Mini-Series. This version is currently available in the DVD format. December 2007 saw a full re-broadcast of the TV version on BBC Four

In 2006 Edgar prepared a shorter version for a production at the Chichester Festival, which transferred in December 2007 and January 2008 to the Gielgud Theatre in the West End. This version has been produced in the US by the California Shakespeare Festival,

Other theatrical adaptations include Smike, the 1838 Nicholas Nickleby; or, Doings at Do-The-Boys Hall (premièred at the Adelphi Theatre and City of London Theatre, and featuring Mary Anne Keeley as Smike), an 1850s American version featuring Joseph Jefferson as Newman Noggs, and another in the late-19th century featuring Nellie Farren as Smike. The most recent theatre adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby as a musical was performed by The Bedford Marianettes. The world premiere opened on 23rd October 2012 at The Place theatre in Bedford, featuring Daniel Pothecary as the eponymous and titular Nicholas Nickleby, Chris Lynch as Smike and Bill Prince as Mr Squeers. The music, lyrics and libretto was written by Tim Brewster and is available for both professional and amateur production.

An early theatrical version actually appeared before publication of the serialised novel was finished, with the resolution of the stage play wildly different from the finished novel. Dickens' offence at this plagiarism prompted him to have Nicholas encounter a "literary gentleman" in chapter forty-eight of the novel. The gentleman brags that he has dramatised two hundred and forty-seven novels "as fast as they had come out – in some cases faster than they had come out", and claims to thus have bestowed fame on their authors. In response Nicholas delivers a lengthy and heated condemnation of the practice of adapting still-unfinished books without the author's permission, going so far as to say:

If I were a writer of books, and you a thirsty dramatist, I would rather pay your tavern score for six months, large as it might be, than to have a niche in the Temple of Fame with you for the humblest corner of my pedestal, through six hundred generations —chapter 48.