Evening Standard, 28 December 1994, by Nick Curtis.
A romp amid the Terror
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This Christmas it is a far, far better thing for a show to 
be gruesome than genial. After the Young Vic's grotesque 
"Grimm Tales" comes Matthew Francis's romping adaptation of 
Dickens's French Revolutionary yarn, which also stands 
(guillotined) head and shoulders above the more trad panto 
offerings. I don't know the novel well, but Francis's 
version has the ring of authenticity in its honest 
characterisations and seamless if improbable plot. The 
gloomy opening incantation, "recalled to life," rings out 
across Julian McGowan's ingenious set of platforms and 
banisters. The resurrectee is Doctor Manette, incarcerated 
for years in Bastille, attic room and isolated madness after 
witnessing an aristocratic murder. 

Five years on, the recovered Manette and his sweet daughter 
Lucie testify for young Charles Darnay, who is accused of 
treason. He's acquitted thanks to his uncanny likeness to 
his slovenly solicitor Carton, falls in love with and 
marries Lucie. But Darnay is a turncoat aristo himself, and 
when he returns to revolutionary Paris to save a servant, 
he's captured and condemned by the very citizens he 
championed. But remember, he and the malcontent Carton, 
abased in love for Lucie, look as alike to the French as two 
petit pois dans une pod. 

Dickens, flitting between cities and time zones, contrasts 
private morality with political expediency as the republican 
Terror replaces royalist brutalism and Darnay is tarred with 
the reactionary brush. Selfish Carton and selfless Darnay 
are two sides of the same ethical coin, triumphantly flipped 
at the end in Carton's almost religious redemption. God 
loves a reformed sinner, and so do audiences. 

Francis pares down the plot, studding it with explanatory 
speeches and flourishing sword fights, and conducts it as a 
wittily melodramatic adventure. His production is always on 
the move, revelling in the old-fashioned virtues of grand 
heroism and gripping storytelling. 

Against the sterling work of the ensemble, Julian Forsyth, 
Eleanor Tremain and Bernard Lloyd admirably embody the 
virtues of the saintly Doctor and Lucie Manette and 
honourable banker Jarvis Lorry, managing to avoid cloying 
smugness. Alexis Denisof is too simperingly insipid even for 
the sappily noble Darnay, but Timothy Walker is a star. An 
actor who sometimes goes over the top with all the doomed 
verve of a Somme regiment, here his Sydney Carton is 
wonderfully contained. With the go-hang strut of a 
bedraggled peacock and an arrogant sneer that borders on a 
self-loathing snarl, this reprobate's redemption makes a 
truly moving ending to a truly enjoyable evening. Until 4 
February. Box office: 081 858 7755/853 3800. 

Picture: Reprobate's redemption: Timothy Walker in "A Tale 
of Two Cities"  


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