The Guardian, 4 January 1995, by Claire Armitstead.
New Life for The Cities - A new adaptation at the Greenwich 
Theatre shows that A Tale Of Two
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Dickens's sweeping soap opera of the French Revolution 
offers a timely glimpse of the appalled fascination that was 
grandparent to our own society's Europhobia. In his choice 
of the revolution as the backdrop for the serialisation that 
was to launch his new journal, "All The Year Round," in 
1859, Dickens was following a track already well beaten by 
his fellow hacks. 

It was a shrewd move, and within a year of its appearance "A 
Tale Of Two Cities" had been picked up for the stage. 

A century and a half later, in Matthew Francis's absorbing 
adaptation for Greenwich Theatre, it has lost none of its 
appeal. 

The flamboyant barbarities of the French are offset with a 
piquant vignette of little-Englishness from the stout-
hearted housekeeper Miss Pross, trying valiantly to make 
eggs do their business in a foreign pastry. 

While sympathising with a people driven to revenge by the 
wanton cruelties of an aristocracy who think nothing of 
driving their coaches over the bodies of children, the story 
is premised on a belief that the English are too decent for 
revolution - even those who, like Charles Darnay, are 
related to the French, or who, like Sydney Carton, appear to 
have gone to the bad. 

Carton is one of Dickens's most Victorian heroes: a 
dissolute aristo redeemed through love of a good woman, who 
goes willingly to the guillotine to save her husband's life. 
It's a great role, and Timothy Walker seizes it with a 
towering performance, built on a sturdy emotional logic. 
Both Carton's dissoluteness and his heroism come from the 
same flair for self-dramatisation: he starts out as a great, 
glowering slab of self-pity and ends up in statuesque 
martyrdom. His almost tangible increase in stature makes 
Alexis Denisof's conventionally handsome Charles fade into 
insipidness and reflects an increasing radiance on Eleanor 
Tremain's lovely Lucie. 

The dramatic progression is cleverly framed by Julian 
McGowan's towering set, whose nooks and crannies lend 
themselves generously to changes of location and narrative 
style - from the attic, where Julian Forsyth's blanched 
Manette stitches his shoes like a bewitched cobbler, to an 
Old Bailey flanked by hanging corpses; from the looming 
stagecoach of Mark Saban's grotesquely powdered Marquis, to 
the square in which Carton gives himself to the terrifying 
swish of the guillotine. 

Until February 4 (081-858 7755). 



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