Water Pip Down

Middle child: (from left) Gaynor Barrett, Zachary Freed & Robert Ousley.

by Toby Zinman

Great ExpectationsThrough April 28, Walnut Street Theatre, Ninth and Walnut sts., 215-574-3550

Although Great Expectations is, by Dickensian standards, only a medium-sized novel, a mere 500 pages as compared with the whopping 900 pages of some of the others, it’s still got plenty of plot and characters and complications. It’s also got about a zillion changes of locale. Adapting it for the stage -- assuming you don’t want a show that lasts 10 hours -- is a tricky business, made trickier by the book’s beloved place in readers’ hearts.

And if novel-reading is an absolutely intimate experience -- just the reader and the page -- theater-going is an absolutely communal one. Which is to say, not only do you have to tolerate the candy-eating, phone-ringing, whispering and coughing of your fellow audience members, but you have to tolerate the interpretation of the book by the playwright, the director, the actors and the designers. Given all of that, this new adaptation of GE has turned out nicely enough. And if this Mr. Jaggers isn't my Mr. Jaggers, well, that's show business.

This is the story of Pip, an orphaned boy raised by his mean aunt and her kindly husband, a blacksmith whose goodness of heart more than compensates for his lack of learning and polish. Once Pip meets the beautiful, icy Estella at rich Miss Havisham's house, he longs to be a "gentleman" and thus win her love. Opportunity knocks: A mysterious benefactor provides money and opportunity, and Pip's life is altered forever. This is, of course, a lesson about the hollowness of success determined by money and class, a reminder that real wealth springs from generosity of spirit. The novel, unlike the show, provides many occasions to be deeply moved -- Dickens could "make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait" like nobody else.

As for the "waiting": For the solution to the mysteries (Who is the benefactor? Who will win the scornful Estella? Who is the convict? etc.) as well as for Pip's learning his life lesson, it is much diminished on stage, since the coincidences come thick and fast, separated only by minutes rather than hundreds of pages. The horrors of 19th-century childhood are played for laughs rather than tears, and many of the major themes are more or less abandoned: the nature of identity, the passage of time, the role of women, the dangers of the Industrial Revolution, the English law, English snobs and Englishness.

The joining of the half-English, half-American cast (the show premiered in the U.K. and is directed by the Derby Playhouse's Mark Clements) is mostly seamless; as the grown-up Pip, Pascal Langdale finesses the acting/narrating job impressively, shifting from country accent to city accent as smoothly as he switches costumes. Homeboy Ian Merrill Peakes is fine as Pip's best friend, but Alun Raglan seems a bit too tame to convey Blacksmith Joe's physical and spiritual power. As Miss Havisham, the madwoman who lives frozen in the moment of her jilting years ago, Elizabeth Shepherd gets it altogether wrong: She is far too sane, too smiley, too robust to be the cobwebbed lunatic who finally learns the error of devoting a life to regret and revenge.

The stage effects (by Nicki Turner and Chris Ellis) are terrific: the Cruikshank-like silhouettes the actors create when Pip arrives in London, the spectacular fire, the final starry sky. But since the show opts for a parade of incidents, a pageant of narrated scenes, rather than real dramatization, these moments are the only theatrical ones we get.

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