The Signalman

by Charles Dickens (adapted by Francis Evelyn)

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 7 March 2026

Michael Lunney directs Chris Walker as the Signalman and John Burton as the Traveller in a stage adaptation of one of Charles Dickens's most famous short stories "The Signalman". In an elaborately detailed set featuring the Signalman's cottage beside a tunnel's entrance on a remote branch line, the chance encounter between a Traveller curious to explore the burgeoning railways and the Signalman troubled by inexplicable occurrences near "his" tunnel takes place.

The original story is only thirteen pages long in an anthology of Dickens's short fiction published by Penguin in 1976; it originally appeared in the 1866 Christmas number of All the Year Round, a magazine edited by Dickens, which he called Mugby Junction. Naturally the story needed some expansion to justify its being turned into a play of decent length, and so there is far more circumstantial detail including an extended account of the Traveller's experiences in South America, and several references to a serious derailment of the boat train in Kent, in which, as it happened, Dickens was actually a passenger.

The impulse to expand the story is understandable, but some of the details were questionable. The Signalman is made out to be a Roman Catholic, and various noises and mysterious movements of items in his cottage (falling books, and eventually a fallen cross) are added to increase the spookiness, but I doubt that an author as talented as Dickens would have stooped to such devices to create "atmosphere". The strangeness of the story gains much of its power from being inexplicable and quite devoid of tropes of occultism and religiosity that are now all too familiar.

Also, the programme note explicitly sets the tale in 1880, which seems a bizarre choice since the story was written in 1866 and Dickens died in 1870; the only reason is to introduce the extraneous idea that the Signalman has spent years with PTSD after having been involved in the 1865 train derailment.

The effects were well managed, though the appearance of a spectre was perhaps gratuitous: again, in the story the Signalman's experience (narrated by him to the Traveller, who narrates the story) is perforce more enigmatic. In this it looks more to the ambiguities of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) rather than back to the more active ghosts of A Christmas Carol (1843). But part of the impetus for the stage version was to honour occult stage effects as they were practised in the nineteenth century; however, the spectre's manifestation within the cottage undercuts the fateful crisis of the story.

The acting was at times rather perfunctory; the Traveller in particular seemed more disengaged than he should have been; and there is definitely a problem when a realistic set places the fireplace to one side but the characters face away from it towards the audience. After the previous two outings reviews recently, this was far from a memorable experience. 

David Copperfield

by Abigail Pickard Price based on the novel by Charles Dickens

seen at Holy Trinity Church Guildford on 14 February 2026

Abigail Pickard Price directs Eddy Payne as David, and Luke Barton and Louise Beresford playing all the other parts, in her own adaptation of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield for the Guildford Shakespeare Company, with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches assisting in the adaptation.

In an ambitious move, David both tells his own story and acts in it (reflecting the narrative voice of the novel) while the many characters he meets with are portrayed by the two supporting actors employing fast costume changes and prodigious feats of memory and energy. The extremely tall Luke Barton is a natural fit for the strong young fisherman Ham, but he also looms large as Peggotty, David's childhood nurse (as an adult remembered from infancy would seem large in recollection), a frightening Mr Murdstone rendered even more terrifying by being faceless, and a chilling Mrs Steerforth. In a more genial mood he makes a delightful Mr Micawber and an engaging Mr Dick amongst others. In the meantime Louise Beresford takes on the various more feminine parts - Mother, Aunt Betsey, Mrs Micawber, Emily, Dora and Agnes - but also the dangerous James Steerforth and the cringing Uriah Heep. Since many of the scenes cleverly required only three characters this is largely manageable, but there are extraordinary exceptions when it is necessary to have Emily and Steerforth dancing together, and later when Mr Micawber finally denounces Heep, achieved by an inspired sleight of hand with the costumes.

Dickens's characters are often thought to be verging on caricatures rather than 'real' people, but in an adaptation such as this, the broad strokes of his characterisations are ideally suited to the speedy appearance and re-appearance of familiar faces identified by particular postures or turns of phrase, and the sheer pace and skill required to keep the story rolling and the characters clear for the audience matches the headlong style for which Dickens was famous: even with only three actors the stage seemed to teem with characters just as the novel does. The childhood scenes veer from happiness to horror; the Micawbers survive by the skin of their teeth; the Trotwood household is suitably eccentric; David's marriage to Dora is cloying and disastrous as it should be without being over-sentimentalised; and the tragedy of the family in Yarmouth so disastrously introduced to Steerforth by the naive David is surprisingly poignant even if the tidying away of awkward consequences to Australia now seems too easy. Perhaps the long-suffering and patient Agnes does not get her due - but this is arguably a fault in the novel too.

By careful plotting and wise pruning the essential elements of the novel were all present, with only a few lesser characters excised in the streamlining necessary to present a coherent story even with such versatile resources - no Barkis being willing, no Miss Murdstone adding to the oppressive atmosphere in David's childhood home, no Rosa Dartle mysteriously scarred by Steerforth, no Traddles and only a fleeting vestige of Uriah Heep's even more 'umble mother. But in the full flow of action these would only have added needless complications, and what was presented was a hugely enjoyable entertainment.

Dickens with a Difference

Two independently conceived monologues presented at Trafalgar Studio 2, seen on 22 December 2014

Miss Havisham's Expectations 

performed by Linda Marlowe, written and directed by Di Sherlock

Miss ('Norma') Havisham tells us her version of the events described by 'Sir Dick' in 'Great Expectations', explaining her own views on betrayal, rage,vengeance, authorial pomposity, conjuring tricks and much else. There is in fact very little to add to the outline of her story, the main event still being the notorious jilt on her wedding day. 

We are not privy to further details about the romance and its spectacular undoing, except in the most general terms - she loved wildly and not too well, against the advice of family and friends. But there are acerbic opinions about Dickens's own domestic arrangements, about the suitability of the sentiments so loftily expressed in Tennyson's 'In Memoriam', and about the choices available to Victorian women. Miss Havisham proves a dab hand at various conjuring tricks, as well as claiming the rather creepy ability to inhabit her protegee Estella, which allows her to do more than simply present us with an old lady dressed in the fabled tattered wedding gown. She baulks utterly at an attempt to 'inhabit' Pip, the unexpected gulf of gendered experience perhaps proving too much for her arts - but this is the beginning of some sort of recognition that there may be more to the human condition than her own self-involved obsessions.

Linda Marlowe commands the stage with great virtuosity, and the prospect of dealing for an hour with a monomaniacal and embittered old woman is rapidly dismissed as she displays a fine contempt for stereotypes and a sharp (and at times very modern) tongue in explaining her point of view. The sense of the grown-up Estella's cold distaste, or of Pip's finally appalled pity, is necessarily muted from her own perspective, though there is at the very last a hint that she is ready to let go of the monstrous obsession that has defined and ruined her life.

We see not the baffling and eccentric harridan of Pip's childhood encounters, nor merely the vicious and controlling force in Estella's life, nor even the somewhat melodramatic despair of her final appearance in the novel, but rather a more rounded and even at times amusing character with several surprises in store for us and a healthy disregard for 'Sir Dick's' woeful inability to understand women. Whether this actually enhances our view of Miss Havisham and her function in the novel 'Great Expectations' is a moot point.

Sikes and Nancy

by Charles Dickens, adapted and performed by James Swanton

This is an acted version of the explosive readings that Charles Dickens himself used to give of the climactic murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes from his novel 'Oliver Twist'. James Swanton has picked up the story at the point where Fagin sets a spy on Nancy to see whether she is about to betray him and his gang. The spy follows Nancy to London Bridge where she meets Mr Brownlow and Lucy but refuses their offer of aid to escape from her own situation. But Fagin 's version of the encounter when he tells it to Bill Sikes is tailored to his own ends, and shaped by his own fears, with the result that Bill returns to his house and murders Nancy. His reaction to the crime expresses itself in appalled revulsion and fevered hallucinations which eventually lead to his accidentally hanging himself while trying to escape from a mob baying for his death.

James Swanton inhabits his characters with uncanny acuity, so that his tall thin frame can be bent almost to a hunchbacked twistedness to depict Fagin, and can shrink to trembling fear and uncertainty as Nancy attempts to maintain loyalty and some sort of dignity in the face of the imposing Mr Brownlow's insistence on offering the false hope of charity. Moments later he becomes the thuggish and suspicious Sikes. But he also convinces utterly as the unmanned murderer thrashing out violently as the unfortunate Nancy expires, and then being persecuted in his own mind by the girl's spirit haunting him to death. He has an amazing facility with accents, posture, mood and dramatic tension, so that it is always clear what is happening and whom he is representing at any given time. He clearly relishes the ringing phrases Dickens uses to depict the passage of the fatal night, the great set pieces about November fog and darkness in the city as much as the telling strokes of characterisation.

The piece is very different in style and intention from 'Miss Havisham's Expectations', in that it is a performance of what Dickens actually wrote, rather than a response to it. The intoxicating power of Dickens's prose is seen to great advantage here, in contrast to the almost conversational style in which 'Norma' Havisham addresses us. One can well understand how Dickens himself became almost addicted to performing this piece, to the severe detriment of his own health, though one can also readily imagine that more than an hour of such high-pressure prose would tax even the most spellbound audience. This episode was timed exactly to deliver the strongest effect, and it was salutary that the text was taken from the novel itself rather from the inevitable condensations and reorderings of various cinematic adaptations.