The Observer, 8 January 1995, by Kate Kellaway.
Theatre homesickness and home truths.
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<snip>

In Matthew Francis's honourable adaptation of "A Tale of Two 
Cities" (Greenwich Theatre) Dickens himself must take most 
credit. 

I was especially arrested by the passage where a city at 
night is described and we are asked to imagine that within 
each lit room there is a secret, and within every heart 
another. The lines ring out magically like Dickens's 
imaginative manifesto: given the chance, Dickens would, you 
feel, have energetically written his way into every room and 
heart. 

The actors serve Dickens well. The great pleasure of the 
evening is Timothy Walker's performance as Sydney Carton who 
fails in love but triumphs in death. He glitters with a 
self-hate that will later become a fevered, passionate 
selflessness. He looks as if he has dipped his fringe in 
sweat and rolled his frockcoat in dust. But he makes a sexy 
blackmailer, pouring brandies down his throat like repeated 
threats. 

Charles Darnay (Alexis Denisof) sounds and even looks 
unnervingly like a younger version of Tony Blair, full of 
noble ideas but never quite as interesting as you would wish 
him. Dr Manette (Julian Forsyth) resembles a Blakean prophet 
with long, waxy hair, while his daughter Lucie (Eleanor 
Tremain) is the perfect Dickensian heroine. A fearfully pale 
little flower, she demonstrates gracefully the advantages of 
being able to faint neatly in moments of crisis. She has a 
translucent forwardness and as a witness, simply by speaking 
the truth in Darnay's defence, sounds as though she were 
singing the sweetest love song. 

Miss Pross (Susan Porrett) is a comic triumph. Pross 
disapproves of most things including French cooking (she 
complains of having to 'make eggs do their business in a 
foreign pastry') and imagination. She'd disapprove of this 
show. 

<snip>

"Leave Taking" is in rep at the Cottesloe, Royal National 
Theatre, London SE1 (071-928 2252) to 14 Jan, then tours the 
UK to 25 March; "A Tale of Two Cities" Greenwich Theatre, 
London SE10 (071-928 2252) to 4 Feb; "Quelques Fleurs" Old 
Red Lion, London EC1, (071-837 7816) to 28 Jan 



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