Production notes for "David Copperfield"
Welcome to our new season, the fourteenth in Eastern Angles' history.
I had long harboured an ambition for Eastern Angles to do "David Copperfield", a book that is not only a well-loved Dickens classic but one with strong East Anglian connections. On returning to is a couple of years ago and reading around, in preparation for this production, I was forced to revise some of my initial assumptions. For a start it is a novel that is profoundly underestimated. I thought of it principally as the haunt of some of Dickens' most wonderful and famous characters, Uriah Heep, Mr and Mrs Micawber, Steerforth, Traddles, Peggotty, Betsey Trotwood and David himself. It is a very first team of Dickens' players - I was surprised to find them all in one novel. Like many of my age, though I was brought up with a set of Dickens on my grandparents' shelf, it was the BBC Sunday serial which actually gave me my first acquaintance with his work and over the years I had scattered the names I remembers through several of the stories. In terms of concentration alone and mastery of the literary airwaves then "David Copperfield" is in a class of its own.
But we must go further. It came as an even greater surprise to me to learn that the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was a huge admirer of the book. After reading an early translation in Russia, where Dickens was widely admired, he ordered an English copy, along with a dictionary, in order to read it in its original language for himself. He regarded the book as a near perfect example of the art of novel-construction and as an exacting portrayal of the perils of marriage. In fact Tolstoy then proceeded to use exactly the same idea in his own "War and Peace". It is clear then that "David Copperfield", far from being just another book in a very full shelf of Dickens, or a colourful brocade of bizarre characters,, or even merely a cosy tea-time tableaux of pictures, is a novel of world renown and deserves its place in he great canon of storytelling.
Of course much of the fuel for this achievement was drawn from Dickens' own life. Here for the first time, he wrote in the first person. He had tried writing autobiography but gave up. Instead he approached the incidents of his own life, mirrored in David's early life, from a creative angle. His occasional school days, being set to work in the blacking factory, his visits to his father imprisoned for debt, his own father's flowery locutions and over-wrought speech, all found their way into the book and achieve a power that the fragments of his autobiography never achieved.
The two most fascinating questions, however, relate to Dora and Agnes. Many theories have been made as to their origin. The tension between these two women of so different temperament and outlook is as old as time itself. Nor does Dickens load the dice. Dora in some ways has more self-knowledge than her more capable rival, and even rival seems too harsh a word for the selfless Agnes. And at the end we still feel that we are at the beginning. Dicken's own relationships with women shed a remarkable, if still unclear, light on these imaginative creations. It might be said that he married a Dora himself and yearned for an Agnes, or that his infatuation late in life with young Nelly Ternan, with her abundance of curls, proved that he never overcame him susceptibilities. Let the arguments commence and the play begin.
Ivan Cutting - Artistic Direcor