The Theater: Mr. Dickens

In his later years Charles Dickens was almost as famous a reader as he was a writer. What he read were his own works, aloud, before huge, rapturous, often hysterical audiences in England, Scotland, Ireland, the U.S. These strenuous performances filled his pockets, ministered to his stage-struck ego and almost certainly shortened his life. His friends, indeed, opposed his 1867 U.S. tour, which proved as taxing as it was triumphant.

Last year Playwright-Actor Emlyn (Night Must Fall) Williams, a rabid Dickensian, got the idea, not just of repeating the Dickens readings, but of impersonating the author—clothes, whiskers and all. A hit in London, Williams—like Dickens—began a U.S. tour in Boston, last week reached Manhattan. His success on Broadway was more than a stunt: it neatly blended novelty with nostalgia, proved Dickens to be a “dramatic” novelist, Williams to be a colorful Dickens in a studiously varied program.

Actually, the varied fare proved less a virtue than a vice. By Dickens standards, too much of Williams’ material was close to mediocre. The brief annals of Paul Dombey exposed Dickens’ mawkish side; a little-known ghost story, The Signalman, raised no goose pimples. Surprisingly, the one real nonhumorous success was a dramatic pastiche from A Tale of Two Cities. Even much of the humor was secondbest. Williams did score a bull’s-eye with a minor yarn, Mr. Chops. If a showman as gifted as Emlyn Williams ever goes to work on the great comic figures in Dickens —Pecksniff, Micawber, Sairey Gamp, Mrs. Jellyby, the Wellers—he should achieve a truly topnotch show.