06/07 main season
podcasts
melodrama, re(de)fined (1.4MB mp3)
staging dickens: making a new stage version of oliver twist (3.6MB mp3)
40 years of history—52 moving trucks (1.5MB mp3)
staging dickens: making a new stage version of oliver twist
40 years of history—52 moving trucks
melodrama, re(de)fined
Melodrama is a dramatic style which has, over the years, fallen into disfavor. Its penchant for heightened states of emotion, florid rhetoric, actions that seem obvious or unbelievable, characters who are wholly good or bad—all these features seem inauthentic to our current, reality based sensibilities. The very word has become synonymous with “too much” or “over the top” or “untrue.” When trying to appear intelligent, we frequently champion the sleek, clear lines of tragedy over the wild mix of sentiments and style inherent in melodrama.
For Charles Dickens and his large, rapt audience, the opposite was true. With each new installment of his novels (most were released chapter by chapter in newspapers and magazines), readers were left hanging to discover what wild twists of plot, what dastardly doings, what morally outrageous events would be revealed in the next episode. They waited with baited breath to see if the invariably innocent, idealistic heroes of Dickens’ stories would survive the vicious and interminable suffering inflicted by the villain.
Yet the key to Dickens’ success was his ability to marry a terrifically entertaining writing style with a vivid and shocking description of the truth. His searing, moving portrayals of people trapped in the social landscape of 19th century London have left an indelible memory on anyone who has read his books. He knew first-hand about the horror of child labor, knew about the tragedy behind every bankruptcy, knew about the rapacious appetite of men whose sole purpose in life was to acquire more wealth. His unparalleled popularity (his books have never gone out of print) was based not only in his ability to escape reality through gorgeous prose, but to depict hyper-realistic, epic scenarios that capture the titanic force of history and the universal qualities of human behavior.
This ingenious aesthetic strategy is being employed to this very day. Is the melodramatic technique employed by Dickens so different from the one used by some of our best modern writers? Are the twists of fate in Oliver Twist so different from those in Amores Perros? Is the exploitation of stereotype used to create the indelible portrait of the Jewish villain Fagin any different from those used to create his modern Italian counterpart, Tony Soprano? Is our collective yearning for a happy ending to Oliver’s story any different from what we feel at the end of Angels in America?
How ironic, then, that what British Director Neil Bartlett has done in restoring Oliver Twist to its melodramatic roots feels surprisingly radical. Digging into the original text, uncovering the contradictory mores of Victorian England, re-conceiving the entire event as a human “penny dreadful” (the original pulp fiction), Bartlett and his collaborators have attempted to reassert the vitality of Oliver Twist. They have created an event whose force is not beneath the surface, but is a part of the surface. Embracing the fact that melodrama was the perfect vehicle for Dickens to describe his world, Bartlett and company seek to celebrate the form itself, with all its disparate elements and stylistic choices. By doing so, they have de-mythologized Oliver Twist, reclaiming the piece as a dark, wild, strange, funny, melodramatic entertainment. And as a piece of art.
What a worthy way to end our season.
Thanks for being a part of it.
Tony Taccone
Artistic Director
staging dickens:
making a new stage version of oliver twist
by Neil Bartlett
Any new stage version of a story which the audience feels they not only know but own before the curtain even rises has to do two apparently contradictory things. It has to deliver all the famous bits (so that no one feels shortchanged), but also has to make the audience feel that they are encountering the story anew, afresh; that they are hearing and seeing things which they either never knew or had forgotten were there.
The first decision taken in making this adaptation was that it would be made out of Dickens’ original language and nothing but. With the exception of one or two short phrases necessitated by the telescoping of the novel’s plot, this is a decision which has been abided by. Indeed, the extraordinary energy and volatility, the sadistic black comedy and sheer dramatic guts of Dickens’ actual sentences are the raisons d’être of this piece. Returning to the original words—even for the singing in the show—was the main way in which I hoped to avoid any bowdlerization of the tale. I wanted the show to be as alarming, as compelling and as wickedly comic as Dickens’ words are. Of course, which words I have chosen to include, and which words I have chosen to omit, reveal what I personally care most about in this story. I hope.
the question of tone
“It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodrama, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon. The hero sinks upon his bed, weighed down by misfortune; the next scene regales the audience with comic song.”—Oliver Twist, Chapter 17
What do we mean by the word ‘Dickensian’? Not, I think, simply subject matter taken from the lower depths of urban poverty. Rather, I think we mean a distinctive way of dramatizing what is seen.
The first nineteenth-century stagings of Oliver Twist—some made even before the final parts of the original, serialized novel had been published—have scripts of quite extraordinary ferocity and brevity. One of them gets the whole proceedings down to 30 handwritten pages, and still finds time for plenty of rambling low comedy from the Bumbles. They all seek to unashamedly achieve one objective—namely, to rouse the audience. To achieve this end, they employ the most remarkable combinations of comedy with horror, satire with sentiment. They demand that the audience enjoys the most alarming leaps of dramatic tone. They are also very fond of (and good at) employing those most powerful forms of theatrical shorthand—the baldly stated moral, the tableau and the melodrama. In doing all of this they are of course entirely in keeping with Dickens’ own dramatic and dramatizing instincts in Oliver Twist.
Dickens is, paradoxically, the most serious of writers, in that he takes this task of engaging us, his audience, with such wholehearted seriousness. I wanted to create an adaptation that would not shy away from this seriousness, but rather relish it; that would demand of its actors they engage with their audience above all else. This is why the script does not try to shift Dickens into some solid or polite middle ground of dialogue-based, psychologized ‘literary’ theatre, but lets his story move alarmingly (demandingly) through all its intensely-felt and highly-colored original shifts of theatrical tone. It is only when melodrama is allowed to rub shoulders with psychodrama, when sensationalism combines with fierce and socially committed satire, that you arrive in the particular world of the dramatic imagination that we can only describe with the tautology ‘Dickensian.’
the set
“Sudden shiftings of scene, and rapid changes of time and place, are not only sanctioned in books, by long usage, but are by many considered a great art.”—Oliver Twist, Chapter 17
The first visual and physical inspiration for our set was a visit to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds. This not only renewed my interest in the unheimlich appeal of waxworks, especially those depicting extreme violence, but also triggered in designer Rae Smith’s imagination a connection between the sensationalist mechanics of Dickens’ plot—its combination of creaky contrivance with uncanny power—with the mechanical toys which we now know as ‘Penny Dreadful’ machines. These are the sinister glass-fronted boxes which, in response to a child inserting the required coin, bring to life miniature tableaux of haunted houses, historic crimes or mildly erotic misdemeanors. One of these boxes, emptied and magnified, as if by a child’s imagination, provided the basic setting. The early-19th century theatrical vocabulary of fly ropes, trapdoors, footlights and two-dimensional scenery also influenced the design of the show, allowing and indeed encouraging a script which cuts and dissolves from scene to scene without any establishing shots (to confuse matters by employing a cinematic vocabulary)—and, largely, without any narrative linking passages.
the music
“The preliminaries adjusted, they proceeded with flourishes of most unmusical snatches of song, mingled with wild execrations.”—Oliver Twist, Chapter 26
The popular theatre which Dickens knew and loved was almost all, in the original sense of the word, melodrama; an evening at the theatre without live music barely existed in the first half of the 19th century. This script, too, is a melodrama, in that the telling of the story presupposes that the actors work with (and sometimes against) music in their telling of that story, and the creation of the different places and atmospheres which that story takes us to. The music is all adapted from popular early-19th century music-hall numbers contemporary with the novel, and arranged for an authentic (if somewhat alarming) early Victorian combination of violin, serpent and hurdy-gurdy.
the plot
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”—Miss Prism, The Importance of Being Earnest
This is a story with a single overriding desire; to find a family for its orphan hero. Every scene in the book can be read in this light; every character too. In the absence of Oliver’s mother, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry—even Noah Claypole and Charlotte—all attempt, in their various twisted ways, to mother him. Fagin and Mr. Brownlow, in their archetypically opposite worlds, construct surrogate families for Oliver. Everyone (even Mr. Grimwig) is convinced that they know the right way for the boy to live. All of these conflicting dreams of family life, so deeply rooted in their creator’s own childhood, are powerful; Nancy’s dream of a possible home for Oliver—her determination that he will have the childhood she knows has been stolen from her—is so fierce that it kills her.
In editing Dickens’ labyrinthine plot, I wanted to arrive at a script whose economy would encourage the actors to concentrate on trying to get back to the blunt realities of the original cast-list. Nancy is, after all, a teenage prostitute with a violent owner, not a musical-comedy star; the boys Fagin says he finds sleeping rough at Kings Cross are very like the teenagers who still sleep rough there; Bill is a violent housebreaker and a coward; Fagin is Jewish, and his vicious rage is that of someone who lives excluded from everything we might conceivably call society.
Some of the events of the great final working-out of the story may surprise audiences who only know it from films. I’ve kept what for me is the greatest and strangest scene of the book, where, on the night before his death, Fagin goes mad with terror, and in his madness realizes that Oliver is ‘somehow the cause of all this.’ I’ve taken Mr. Brownlow and Rose seriously. I’ve dared to kill off not just Nancy and Bill, but Fagin and the Dodger, as Dickens does. I’ve even dared to believe, as Dickens did, that after all the strange violent parodies of family life that claim him—the brutal workhouse of the Bumbles, the gothic funeral-parlor of the Sowerberries, the nightmare inversion of all maternal values in Fagin’s den—the motherless Oliver’s destiny is the one we must all, despite our evidence to the contrary, believe in: safety.
a brief dickensian lexicon
workhouses
In 19th century England, if you were poor, an unwanted orphan, too old to work, sick or deranged, you could end up in a workhouse. Hundreds of inmates lived and worked in each of these workhouses, beginning in 1723 when they were introduced to prevent poor people from taking advantage of the parishes’ free support. Rather than receiving “poor relief,” a poor person now had to work to earn his or her aid.
poor laws
Since 1601, the Elizabethan Poor Law had stipulated that local parishes must employ overseers whose primary function was to care for the poor. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 took the responsibility for caring for the poor away from parishes, and poor people were no longer allowed to live at home. In order to continue to receive support, they had to live in prison-like workhouses, separated from their families, working at least ten-hour days (usually more) and barely eating enough to stay alive. Workhouses were not abolished until the 1929 Local Government Act, when the responsibility of caring for the poor was transferred to the county. By the 1940s, the Poor Laws were replaced by a system of welfare services.
public houses (or pubs)
Under English common law, inns and taverns were designated as “public houses” whose responsibility it was to care for all travelers who were willing to pay for food, drink and lodging.
juvenile justice
During the early 19th century, crimes frequently associated with juveniles were reduced to non-capital crimes. Picking pockets had been punishable by death until 1808, but many juveniles were instead shipped to Australia, where the public felt they were far enough removed from society. In the mid-1800s, with the increase in juvenile crime, court system reforms gave children quicker and less public trials, and prisons were replaced with juvenile institutions. Children generally became juvenile offenders because of their level of poverty and the encouragement from their peers to begin petty theft. When caught, they would be brought in front of the magistrate, and would receive a fine, whipping or short stay in a prison if found guilty. This system did not discourage many from a life of crime; they would work their way up the criminal ladder, eventually committing more serious burglaries and appearing at higher courts. If found guilty there, they would be sentenced to more prison time, transportation out of the country or death.
money
2 farthings = 1 half penny (or “haypenny”)
2 half pennies = 1 penny
1 penny = 1 pence
12 pence = 1 shilling
20 shillings = 1 pound
1 pound + 1 shilling (or 21 shillings) = 1 guinea
40 years of history—52 moving trucks
Did you know that the nondescript orange garage across the street holds literally decades of programs, production photos, props and costumes stored by the Theatre? Even if you did, the fact is, it won’t for much longer.
This summer, Berkeley Rep will relinquish its storage garage to Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse, who will convert the warehouse and the next door Capoeira Café into a new performance space for the world music arts group. The Theatre’s new storage space will be on Carlton Avenue, near the Berkeley/Oakland border. While all departments use the space, the prop and costume departments will definitely be the most affected by the move.
“We’re selective in what we store; but theatre props encompass so many things that it definitely adds up,” says Prop Manager Ashley Dawn. They store period furniture, house wares, books and weapons from past shows—anything which could decorate the stage. It’s all used regularly: the department pulls prop pieces for actors, designers and directors to work with during rehearsal; as final decisions about size, weight and actors’ needs are made, the rehearsal props are replaced with production props, which are also often pulled and modified from the warehouse supply.
Having storage so close makes it easy to run across the street and grab sample items during a quick rehearsal break. During a show’s run, the prop department is in and out of the garage several times a day. Costume Manager Maggi Yule says the move will also change how her team meets rehearsal needs. “If Michael [Suenkel, the Theatre’s production stage manager] asks for something, it’ll probably take a day or two, instead of happening instantly,” she says. The costume shop’s stock includes all costumes, wigs, hats and headdresses created at the Theatre over the past several seasons, and often rounds out the costume supply for new productions. “With a period show, we just don’t have the time or the resources to create everything from scratch,” she says. Additionally, both the prop and costume shops rent items to smaller theatres that cannot create their own pieces from scratch. “It’s a great service to the community,” Ashley says, “local theatres have come to rely on Berkeley Rep’s vast stock.”
And of course, since Berkeley Rep often originates work that goes on to have life elsewhere, the Theatre’s rentals are also in demand outside the Bay Area. The costumes from Passing Strange remain with the show at The Public Theatre in New York, and when Associate Artistic Director Les Waters re-mounted Eurydice at Yale Repertory Theatre and New York’s Second Stage Theatre earlier this year, the prop and costume departments pulled nearly all physical components for the show from the warehouse, and sent them east.
Currently, it’s estimated that 52 moving trucks will be needed to relocate everything in the garage. Props and costumes began packing in mid-April for a move that will take place in early June, and workers who normally go off-contract while the Theatre is dark each summer are being kept on-contract this year to help. “It’s a daunting task,” Ashley admits.
Of course, there are advantages to this kind of major move: “We examine the stock every year to weed out stuff that’s old or just too specific,” says Maggi, “but this is a great opportunity to really go through it all and get rid of anything that’s outlived its use.”
And, when you’re about to turn 40—like Berkeley Rep will next year—the chance to do a little spring cleaning isn’t a bad thing.
oliver twist resource list
Solo Voices: Monologues 1987–2004 by Neil Bartlett
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist—The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth Century England by Daniel Pool
The Real Oliver Twist by John Waller
Charles Dickens: Four Novels (Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol) by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, using the original magazine version’s darker text—like our stage adaptation
Oliver Twist (Classic Starts) retold from the Charles Dickens original by Kathleen Olmstead
