The Dickens Of A Good Play

Max Stafford-Clark has overcome a series of strokes that only seem to have intensified his work as a director, and his theatre company Out Of Joint – unmissable when they’re touring - consistently delivers theatre that excites and intrigues. Andersen’s English, written by Sebastian Barry and directed by Stafford-Clark, is the company’s newest production, and although apparently much more sedate than, for instance, their rambunctious version of The Convict’s Opera or their confrontational Macbeth, is gently, wonderfully, intriguing and disquieting.
It’s all the more brilliantly bizarre for being based on a true episode in the life of Charles Dickens, when the Danish writer Hans Christian Anderson, who penned the most existentially bleak fairy tales imaginable, paid a visit to the Dickens household at a time when the great writer was on the brink of his life’s most shocking and shameful episode: when he put aside his wife, Catherine, and denied her access to their many children.
Haunting and funny, Andersen’s English is a play about misunderstanding and the raw truths that hide behind manners and language. Danny Sapani’s immensely sympathetic Andersen, apparently gauche and kindly, is struggling with the English language as well as various physical discomforts. He seems to suffer from a version of Tourette’s, blurting out words and phrases that are accidentally distorted into monstrous social gaffes. Unable to read the Dickens family correctly because of his lack of language, he sees only the best in them, and his visit is seen through spectacles coloured by rose-tinted romanticism.
By contrast extraordinarily eloquent, Dickens (David Rintoul) is able to express the tortures of life within the bosom of his large Victorian family, but is so wrapped up in his own pain that he finds it impossible to see any viewpoint other than his own, or act in a way that is not destructive to his wife or the son he’s about to send to a soldier’s death in India. Niamh Cusack is heartbreaking as Catherine, apparently held together by her carapace of a mid-nineteenth-century costume but beneath it, a beaten, broken being damaged in mind and body by bearing child after child and unable to understand what she has done to deserve being banished from her husband’s heart and life.
Barry has done an astonishing job of turning the meeting of the two men into an odd, intriguing look at their lives that starts off as a strange collision between two worlds and expands into an intelligent, touching and troubling vision of lives in crisis. There are whole worlds of passion, pain and loss that may get lost in translation in Andersen’s English, but which are heartbreakingly apparently to the audience of this marvellous piece of theatre.