Theatre review: London Tide

With the exception of Oliver Exclamation Mark and umpteen Christmas Carols, the works of Charles Dickens (Chickens to his friends) have largely resisted the musical theatre treatment. Ben Power (book and lyrics) and PJ Harvey (music and lyrics) haven't been deterred by the idea that there might be a reason for this, so have tackled Our Mutual Friend, well-known among Dickens' novels as being... definitely one of them. Retitled London Tide, this stage version frames the story as being that of two women who never meet until the very end, but are both affected when a body is fished out of the Thames and identified as the missing heir to a dust fortune. From context I think that means dust as in a waste management firm, not Dark Materials. Bella Wilfer (Bella Maclean) had been due to marry the dead man despite never having met him, and is now suddenly considered a widow without ever having actually married or come into the inheritance.

The money has instead gone to a servant who's now found himself owning his former master's business and fortune. Noddy Boffin (Peter Wight) takes pity on Bella and invites her to stay with him and his wife, and live something of the high life she might have had. There she also meets John Rokesmith (Tom Mothersdale,) Boffin's new secretary who's arrived rather mysteriously out of nowhere.

On the other end of the social scale is Lizzie Hexam (Ami Tredrea,) whose father Gaffer (Jake Wood) fished the body out of the Thames. Falsely accused of having robbed and killed the man, Gaffer dies before he can clear his name and this becomes a family shame passed down to Lizzie and her brother Charlie (Brandon Grace.) In theory this makes Lizzie a pariah who could never marry well, but this doesn't stop earnest lawyer Eugene Wrayburn (Jamael Westman) and Charlie's cadeverous schoolmaster Mr Headstone (Scott Karim) from fighting over her.

Ian Rickson's production makes the most of a misguided project that may do some things well, but never for a moment convinced me it should have been a musical. I've never been a reader of Dickens but I doubt that makes me alone in the audience in not knowing anything about Our Mutual Friend. On the one hand this has the advantage of giving us a story we don't know the end of right from the beginning - something that starts out looking like it'll give us a murder mystery, but plays out more as a tangled melodrama. On the other you've got a sprawling soap opera with numerous scene-stealing supporting characters - Joe Armstrong's thuggish Roger Riderwood, Crystal Condie's all-knowing pub landlady Miss Potterson, Ellie-May Sheridan's professional waif Jenny Wren - trying to squeeze into an almost three-and-a-half hour show.

Bunny Christie gives us the grubby period costumes we might expect from a Dickens adaptation but not the shadowy alleys - instead the Lyttelton stage is an almost-bare white, the main feature being Jack Knowles' lighting rigs which ripple up and down like the waves on the river which forms the location for the whole story as the characters move between North and South Bank, from the river mouth to rural areas miles upstream. It's an interesting visual identity and helps tell the story pretty clearly - albeit without time for much character exploration, or any of the humour we're always assured Dickens is so good at.

But I can't remember when I last saw a musical - if that's what we're calling it, the blurb avoids the term so maybe we're in "play with songs" territory and it could be played without them, and should be - where the music is such a handicap to everything else on stage. Power and Harvey's songs might as well be a single song repeated, they're such a uniform collection of melancholy wailing about how the river is deep, dark and, I don't know, largely made of water. The casting seems to have consciously avoided singers (the only major cast member predominantly known for musical theatre is Westman, and that's for a part involving more rapping than singing,) presumably to give it a less polished, grittier feel.

Which might be all very well if the songs weren't already dreary and samey enough. But as the characters occasionally step out of the action to perform one of them, it's painfully obvious the music contributes nothing except length - it's particularly apparent in the second act that the story's just not moving with the impetus it should. PJ Harvey's name on the poster is presumably good for selling more tickets but without the songs this would lose nothing apart from about half an hour of running time. A version of the show that came in under 3 hours would probably still feel a bit overstuffed, but it would still be better than this one that every so often stops in its tracks to laboriously inform us how wet water is.

London Tide by Ben Power and PJ Harvey, based on Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, is booking until the 22nd of June at the National Theatre's Lyttelton.

Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.