Simon Callow wears the mantle of Charles Dickens as comfortably as a Victorian gentleman might have sported a velvet smoking jacket. That is not to say that the two dramatic monologues he delivers during A Festival Dickens don't represent a stretch for him. Both his characters are common types, whose dropped aitches and muddled grammar are ill-suited to such an aristocratically fruity voice. For the most part, he succeeds in keeping its fruitiness in check - until a word or phrase proves too irresistible, and he starts rolling its consonants and emphatically savouring every syllable.
The first tale, about Mr Chops, a circus dwarf who longs for riches and a higher social standing, represents Dickens at his mawkish, moralistic worst. Essentially the story is a self-righteous warning against ambition, and it is enlivened only by the brief descriptions of the erotic thrill Mr Chops enjoys while sitting on a barrel organ. The second tale, of market salesman Dr Marigold, is no less sentimental, but considerably more absorbing. Following the death of his violent wife and beleaguered daughter, Marigold adopts a deaf, mute girl and teaches her to communicate. He is a man complex with guilt and good intentions, and Callow, dressed in an outrageous orange wig and olive knickerbockers, inhabits the character lovingly.
Dickens himself used to perform these monologues, and it's highly likely his show seemed old-fashioned even 150 years ago. Surrounded at the Fringe by bright young things building new and sometimes exciting models for theatre, Callow here appears utterly outdated.
Yet there is something pugnacious about his devotion to classic storytelling that makes his show seem almost like a breath of fresh air. There are no tricks and no fireworks, just a man recounting two stories. If the first is appallingly dull, the second resonates and moves.
