Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel of life in a northern English mill town opens in the schoolroom where Gradgrind instructs the students, as he does his own children, that “facts alone are wanted in life”. Deborah McAndrew’s intelligent new adaptation for Northern Broadsides, however, begins with the circus. Mr Sleary, the ringmaster (Paul Barnhill), supported by drum and brass, invites us, and Gradgrind’s truant children, to leave our troubles “far behind”. An oom-pah rhythm underpins a melody that just skirts cacophony. Conrad Nelson’s music echoes Kurt Weill’s songs for Berthold Brecht and Nino Rota’s soundtracks for Federico Fellini; itevokes the period setting even as it suggests other times and places up to and including our present (Nelson also directs). The circus, here, represents the timeless space of the imagination that is a touchstone of the characters’ humanity.
Those who reject life’s poetry – in the form of the circus, and its personification in the character of Sissy, portrayed with an elemental energy by Suzanne Ahmetare self-interested strangers to compassion: blustering millowner Bounderby (Howard Chadwick) and his sleekit clerk, Bitzer (Darren Kuppan). The depression and recovery of Louisa Gradgrind (Vanessa Schofield) is charted in her relation with Sissy; the redemption of the “practical man”, Louisa’s father (Andrew Price), is accomplished when he accepts the circus - but it is too late for his son, Tom (Perry Moore), whose imagination has been extinguished by Gradgrind’s deformed utilitarianism.
Coketown’s workers subtly counterbalance the circus. Their struggle against Bounderby’s oppression is not sentimentalised. Instead, the production subtly highlights the fact that Stephen the weaver (Anthony Hunt), like Sissy, succeeds in uniting practicality and poetry through love.
• Hard Times tours the UK until 19 May
