A Tale Of Two Cities: Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

It is perhaps wrong to make comparisons between theatrical adaptations, after all, each creative team will have their own vision of how a story should work, how it will play out. But having seen Northampton Royal & Derngate’s magnificent touring production of the classic Dickens, it is hard not to.
This new adaptation has none of the grandeur of scale, the poverty and stark injustice between the rich and the poor, none of the bravery or heroism, the sacrifice… well simply nothing to hold the attention or to make one believe. It’s a sad truth that this adaptation simply does not work. Perhaps the fault lies in the drawing of a parallel between the historic context of the book and modern day injustices centred around the Sangatte refugee camp of Calais, but this manifests itself as a muddle of ideas and ideals and is not in any way helped by the clumsy jumble of contemporary and period costumes, of late 18th century wine shops with cut price off-licenses and of so called “colour blind” casting when so much of the first part of the story depends on a case of mistaken identity. Nor does it help to have the action sign-posted on monitors, fragmented into set pieces announced by members of the cast using and passing around a hand held microphone – you have to ask why?
Sadly for the cast all this leaves them very little to work with and at the end of the evening I left feeling nothing for any of the characters and somewhat patronised that the creators felt that I needed to be spoon fed the idea that there are political and social parallels to be drawn, yes, but I can do that myself thank you. Sadly this was the worst of times!
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
14 July
Andrew Kay
Rating: