Every couple of years someone writes a column saying how she has been to the theatre after long abstinence, had a bad time and decided she will never go again. Every now and then I see what she means. When the theatre is really bad it is intolerable. It is as if it has an auto-immune disease: the very qualities that can make stagework invigorating – liveness, boldness, faith in words, an open heart – turn against it and look like blunders. The best of theatre-makers can produce the worst of shows.
A Tale of Two Cities is a toolkit for stage-haters. In what is described as a new play “adapted” from Dickens’s novel, Matthew Dunster has mashed together the 18th and 21st centuries, intersplicing scenes from the French Revolution and refugee camps, cramming in huge amounts of Dickens’s complicated plot with modern interjections. In a heart-sinking, belt-and-braces manoeuvre, some of the novelist’s words are recited to the audience over the action they describe. Elsewhere, dialogue is more clumpily 21st-century – though following early press complaints that innocent ears were likely to be offended, the play has been trimmed of most of its oaths.
Characters appear in knee breeches and wigs – and in trainers and hoodies. Fly Davis’s design perches bright blue containers in front of the trees. At one point one opens up (bad luck that on press night it got stuck) on to a golden dazzle containing the grabbing aristo villain. Gilt wigs, coats and – oh, this overdoes it – a gilded lavatory. At the side, screens flash up all too predictable videos of Donald Trump.
Everything is over-explicit and under-explained. Dialogue is yelled but does not land, evaporating in bellow. The theatrical lexicon looks faded – characters freeze into tableaux, do slow-motion gestures and speak in chorus – yet the show insists on contemporary parallels. Crucially, these parallels are not sufficiently exact. Sometimes I think Britain should be on the brink of revolution – but I don’t think we are. Dickens’s story could speak for itself.
It is an unexpected failure. Since he took over the Open Air theatre 10 years ago, Timothy Sheader, who directs, has revivified Regent’s Park with unexpected scheduling and smart productions. Dunster has been crackingly successful with bold touches of modernity at the Globe.
Every now and then there is a glimmer of what makes Dickens so wild and original. His portraits of mania and obsession are unmatched. Madame Defarge clacks away on her needles, encoding into her knitting the names of people to be killed. Dr Manette, father of the heroine, now looks like a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder, retreating from pain and memory into repetitive routines as a cobbler. But most of the big moments are whimpers. When the Bastille falls, three people pound around in a haze of smoke and red light, like children having a tantrum. Not so much a storm as a shower.
