Dickens published in instalments, which is what makes his novels so ideal for TV serialisation and so unwieldy on stage. Do you go for broke, like the RSC's Nicholas Nickelby, and produce a nine-hour extravaganza? Or is it better to reduce and compress that vast slab of words until only the very essence is squeezed out?
Sadly Giles Havergal's adaptation, first produced at Chicago's Steppenwolf theatre five years ago, is neither one thing nor the other. It might be tolerable if one were able to watch it in 20-minute episodes, but whereas Dickens left his original readers breathless to know what would happen next, the pedestrian literalness of Havergal's three-hour production has you wondering how much more of it there is to come.
It's a précis rather than a theatrical transformation: the editing does nothing to tauten the dramatic pace of the action, while divesting the novel of some of its more enjoyable minor characters. Inexplicably, Barkiss is missin'. Those that remain are simply foils for their defining characteristic: Steven O'Neill's Uriah Heap is very 'umble, Peter Reynolds's Peggotty is as rough as a sea porpoise and Andy Hockley's Micawber is still waiting for something to turn up.
Saskia Butler's flighty Dora makes a fleeting impression, but she doesn't have long. She develops a cough in her second scene that makes it sure as eggs she'll be dead five minutes later. Even the single gesture towards narrative innovation is bizarrely mishandled. Havergal shadows the younger version of Copperfield (Mark Rice-Oxley) with an elder version (Rupert Frazer) throughout. Yet all this greying doppelganger gets to do is mooch around the periphery while smiling indulgently at his former self.
You might think, at the very least, that the point of a good costume drama would be some good costumes. But for no clear reason the action is shunted forward 50 years to bestow an early-20th-century look. Why? Because the frocks are cheaper? And where's Peggotty's boat? Perhaps, like the rest of the production, it's out at sea.
· Until May 28. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
