The Times, 21 December 1994, by Benedict Nightingale.
"In good hands from the start."
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A Tale of Two Cities, Greenwich 

Nobody would claim that "A Tale of Two Cities" is one of 
Dickens's finest novels, and that may be the very reason it 
proves such a success at Greenwich. The big, intricate, 
sprawling books require eight hours on the RSC's stage or, I 
suppose, half a dozen lavishly costumed episodes on BBC2. 
But "A Tale of Two Cities" is not "Nicholas Nickleby" or 
"Martin Chuzzlewit." It is robust without being rich, and 
hence readily translates into the kind of Victorian 
melodrama Dickens himself enjoyed. 

You know you are in good hands from the start. Instead of a 
rhetorical "it was the best of times, it was the worst of 
times," there is the sound of frantic whinnies, hooves and 
whips, followed by the words "recalled to life," repeated by 
one member of the cast after another. Right away, we are 
plunged into the tall tale of Dr. Alexandre Manette, who is 
taken by coach to the Marquis of St Evremonde's satanic 
chateau and, because he sees what he sees, shut up in prison 
cells and slum garrets until his belated discovery by his 
daughter. 

The good hands belong to Matthew Francis, who has adapted 
and then directed the Nich-Nickish blend of dialogue and 
narrative he has stitched together. He reveals the secrets 
of Manette's past far earlier than Dickens, but thereby 
gains more in momentum than he loses in tension. Add some 
consistently strong acting to the bustle and flow, and the 
sentimentality that so flaws the original seems scarcely to 
matter. 

Did even Dickens create a more improbably sweet wife and 
daughter than Lucie Manette? As Eleanor Tremain gently and 
self-effacingly plays her, she quite fails to cloy. Did the 
old romantic invent a more outrageously decent fellow for 
her to marry than Charles Darnay? Alexis Denisof, too, sets 
the teeth only slightly on edge. In Dickens's preposterously 
black-and-white world, was there ever a more unquestioningly 
loyal friend for the principals than Jarvis Lorry? No; but 
he is played by Bernard Lloyd, an actor who could make you 
believe that Tiny Tim was as solid as Christy Brown, were he 
to get himself some ragged shorts and a crutch. 

Myself, I believed in just about everyone and everything 
Francis brought onto Julian McGowan's higgledy-piggledy, 
jungle-jim set: Lorry and the Manettes, sneering French 
aristos with wigs disconcertingly like Margaret Thatcher's 
more regal perms, bloodthirsty crowds, fanatic radicals, and 
a guillotine that plumps heads into baskets with dextrous 
realism. I even swallowed those wonderful Dickensian 
coincidences. 

The most famous of these involves Sydney Carton, the 
slovenly barrister who is desperately in love with Lucie and 
looks so much like her husband that no tricoteuse could spot 
the difference. In Timothy Walker's performance, he twitches 
and winces about the stage with his booze, exuding both the 
self-deprecating nihilism that makes him sound the modern he 
wasn't and, at the end, the highmindedness that places him 
as a Victorian in 18th-century dress. On reflection, what he 
says about the beautiful cities and the happy people of the 
future is the sort of wishful tosh that Dickens spent much 
of his career conscientiously contradicting. But at the time 
I believed that too.  



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