Daily Telegraph, 4 January 1995, by Robert Gore-Langton.
Monty Python's reign of terror 
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Of the dozens of Dickens adaptations on stage around the 
country, the most action-packed is the story set against the 
silhouette of Madame Guillotine and the Terror. 

"A Tale of Two Cities" is of course a ripping yarn, which is 
exactly how Matthew Francis, who has adapted and directed 
this version, stages it. The French Revolution provided 
Dickens with a historical backdrop to a story which 
improbably hinges on the physical likeness of two men, both 
in love with the same girl, Lucie Manette. The ne'er-do-well 
barrister Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine for the sake 
of Lucie's happiness with his rival in love, Charles Darnay. 

To contain the action Julian McGowan has devised a split-
level bare wooden set, a vast tree-house affair with doors 
and fixtures that turn themselves into locations in London 
and Paris - the Old Bailey, the St Antoine suburb of Paris, 
the wine shop of Defarge, and so on. 

But despite its energy, this bustling production is to my 
mind hamstrung by its laboured inventiveness. There is 
something relentlessly stagey about the whole enterprise, 
with its low-budget stagecoaches, musketry and papier-mache 
heads being sliced off into baskets. When a rhubarbing crowd 
effect is needed, Francis has his actors clutching life-
sized puppets. 

Scenes vary wildly in their effectiveness. The trials lack 
tension, but smaller incidents strike home, such as the 
injustice inflicted on the proles by the cruel Marquis and 
his brother (played with coiffured viciousness by Mark Saban 
and Alexis Denisof, the latter doubling up as Charles 
Darnay). When their stagecoach runs down a small child it 
does indeed strike a genuine note of horror. But at other 
times, one cannot help but titter. When Miss Pross and the 
implacable Madame Defarge (Heather Tobias) struggle over a 
pistol, leaving one of them to totter about the stage 
fatally wounded, the scene is vintage Monty Python. 

Of the principals, Lucie Manette as played by Eleanor 
Tremain is everything Dickens heroines usually are - sweet 
and pure and an entirely suitable match for the firm-jawed 
Darnay. Iain Mitchell works hard as both Stryver, the 
barrister, and as Defarge, the ring-leader revolutionary. 
But it is left to Timothy Walker to inject a sense of inner 
life in his portrayal of the scruffy, nihilistic Sydney 
Carton, giving us a real person as well as an unlikely hero. 

The adaptation captures enough of the flavour of the novel 
to remind you of Dickens's power to evoke a living city - in 
this case a population afloat on the "the remorseless sea of 
destruction." But despite some juicy moments, I found myself 
uninvolved by the production and hankering after the full-
blown dottiness of this novel's poor cousin, "The Scarlet 
Pimpernel." Tickets: 081-858 7755 



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