Independent on Sunday, January 1, 1995, by Irving Wardle.
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With a generosity rare among theatrical managements, Matthew 
Francis devotes his Greenwich Theatre programme-note to 
singing the praises of his nearest competitor, the Greenwich 
Studio, and their recent production of Schnitzler's "The 
Green Parakeet." Admittedly, cordial feelings may have been 
straightened by the appearance of the Studio's director, 
Julian Forsyth, as a commandingly haunted Dr. Manette in 
Francis's adaptation of "A Tale of Two Cities," for which 
Schnitzler's French Revolutionary piece has served as a 
curtain-raiser.

Classic melodrama is Greenwich's formula for Christmas. And 
like last year's "The Prisoner of Zenda," the new show is a 
piece of robust, traditional craftsmanship. Its three-story 
timber set (Julian McGowan), exuberantly choreographed 
fights, Guignol tableaux, and stirringly lyrical score (Mia 
Soteriou) evoke the vanished spirit of Bernard Miles' 
Mermaid. Francis's text leaps back and forth over the 18 
years between Manette's false imprisonment and the fall of 
the Bastille without any loss in forward drive.

His production, meanwhile, continually hints at the 
absurdities of Dickensian plotting. "Oh dear!" exclaims 
Bernard Lloyd, as a grizzled banker overcome by the vapours 
when the heroine swoops away at his feet. Masked faces pop 
up from a downstage trap, grinning from ear to ear as Mme. 
Defarge (Heather Tobias) gets busy sawing the head off some 
luckless enemy of the people. And with the mob howling for 
blood, two aristos drift on dripping with lace to complain: 
"We are no longer appreciated as a class." The show hovers 
on the bring of burlesque without ever going over the edge, 
leaving you to imagine what would have happened if someone 
like Ken Hill had been let loose on it. The effect is not to 
ridicule the story, but to distance its more perishable 
elements, so that the essentials come through with redoubled 
energy.

The same goes for the heroic Sydney Carton, played by 
Timothy Walker as a sardonic gopher to a booming, pug-faced 
barrister (Iain Mitchell, straight out of the Garrick Club), 
who seizes his moment of destiny as a brisk man of action 
with no flourishes of Byronic martyrdom. Centrally, what the 
show presents is the transfer of injustice and cruelty from 
one class to another, with Manette tragically divided 
between the two sides. Both as a young victim and a frail, 
mentally shattered survivor, Forsyth emerges as the real 
hero.



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