If the idea of watching a single man perform Dickens for an hour and a half sounds dreary to you, think again.
Striking up a rapport with the audience before even speaking his first line, charismatic thespian Simon Callow produces an enchanting evening of expert story-telling in ‘Dr Marigold and Mr Chops’.
Directed by Patrick Garland, the show opens with ‘Mr Chops’, a parable surrounding the fortunes of a fairground dwarf whose dearest ambition is to enter ‘society’.
However, upon winning the lottery, Mr Chops becomes exploited and abused by the society he once aspired to join, an idea poignantly summed up in his words of, ‘When you’ve got nothing left to give…they laugh at you.’
And the audience themselves are certainly laughing, for although the tale might sound rather sombre in nature, ‘Mr Chops’ is in fact full of humorous moments too, meaning Callow’s performance is utterly captivating from start to finish.
Holding an audience’s attention with a Dickens monologue is no mean feat. However, Callow performs with such gusto and skill that the piece is as accessible as it would have been in Dickens’s own era, despite having not been played for around 150 years now.
The longer of the monologues, ‘Dr Marigold’, is perhaps the more moving of the two. After losing both his wife and daughter, hawker Marigold decides to adopt a young girl named Sophie who is both deaf and dumb. I was initially concerned as to how such subject matter could be portrayed sensitively; however, Callow is again well up to the challenge, evoking both laughter and possibly a few tears from the audience as he narrates Marigold and Sophie’s emotional story.
Callow’s versatile range of accents is also commendable; from Scottish to cockney, he makes the transition between all characters appear effortless.
The only fault I found with the production was that the set was a little mediocre and bare; however, as this is a one-man show, a stripped back set helped ensure that no attention was detracted from Callow’s fantastic performance.
A thoroughly entertaining evening, which will delight both Dickens enthusiasts and general theatre-goers alike.