Viva Brighton Issue #30 August 2015

theatre...........................Our Mutual FriendStaging the unstageable“We’d kind of agreed to do it before I’d read thenovel,” says Frank McCabe, who adapted CharlesDickens’ Our Mutual Friend for a Brighton theatregroup in the late 90s. “I read it with a mix of fascination,joy and terror.”An ambitious, panoramic-look-at-society typenovel, it’s divided critics, but McCabe says it’s great:vivid characters, an absorbing story, humourous,psychological, disturbingly dark in places. It’s alsovirtually impossible to stage.More than 800 pages long, it has “three or fourmain plots and probably eight or nine sub-plots,but they’re not separate, they all weave into oneanother,” McCabe says. “It was criticised at the timeas being labyrinthine and not what we’re used tofrom Dickens, to an extent… in common with a lotof writers in their later years, he’s aiming for a realsense of breadth and universality; he wants to writeabout a society and a nation.“Also, at this point… he wrote almost all of hiswork in monthly episodes for a journal, and there’dbe a dozen or 20 theatre companies around Englandthat would wait for these episodes, and thendramatize them within three days, and mount thesekind of crappy productions of the latest episode.This got under Dickens’ skin after a while.“One of the things he’s doing in Our Mutual Friend,he’s writing a novel that’s unstageable, deliberately,to thumb his nose at these companies that were, ashe thought of it, exploiting him and his work. A lotof the chapters end with a great big set piece like asteamboat sinking on the Thames, just so it couldn’tbe staged.”So McCabe’s challenge was to cut vast chunks froma web of interconnected plots and subplots, whileretaining the book’s grand scope, and finding a wayround the great-big-set-piece problem. It took sixmonths to get a workable version together. Thatversion was seven hours long.The resulting production, in 1998, was ‘muchloved’, according to the write-up of a revival beingstaged at the Brighton Open Air Theatre. They’venow got it down to five hours, to be played in twoparts, by a cast of 18 actors. Just putting together arehearsal schedule was “a bit like the Enigma code,really, we were there for the best part of a day justtrying to fit everything together.“We’ve found in rehearsals that we’ve spent anentire day covering quite a lot of ground, then youlook at it in the context of the whole and it doesn’tfeel like you’ve scratched the surface. There are 89scenes in the show, so you do three or four scenes ina day and they’re looking good, and you think, ‘well,there’s 85 more’. So it is a vast undertaking; you canonly really work on what’s in front of your nose andnot worry about it too much, I think.” Steve RamseyBrighton Open Air Theatre, Wed 19th-Mon 31stAug. See brightonopenairtheatre.co.uk....44....