“Is it possible that, despite all precautions, a storybook could have got into the school?” So demands an outraged Mr Gradgrind (Andrew Price) on discovering his children, Louisa (Vanessa Schofield) and Tom (Perry Moore), have visited the circus. Like the current Tory government with its EBacc, Gradgrind doesn’t believe in the imagination. He wants his children taught only facts.
But as Tom and Louisa – who is married off to the elderly mill-owner, Bounderby (Howard Chadwick) – both soon discover, facts don’t offer the creativity, empathy and love needed to negotiate life.
In any case, as Dickens makes clear in his 1854 novel, what is a fact depends very much on other issues, including wealth and social standing. Bounderby, a man full of fictions, can insist the smoke-laden air of Coketown is good for the lungs because he is rich and powerful. Impoverished weaver Stephen Blackpool (Anthony Hunt) can’t access divorce, and the rich easily evade justice.
The raggle-taggle circus with its warmth and camaraderie become the antidote to the cold, unfeeling, industrialised world, and it provides both colour and a sense of otherworldliness in Conrad Nelson’s production for Northern Broadsides. Some of the acting is very much on the broad side, and Nelson never solves how to get his cast on and off the stage in the Viaduct’s awkward and acoustically unsympathetic space.
The mill workers, struggling to unionise, get minimal air time in Deborah McAndrew’s adaptation, which feels as if it is wrestling against the odds to cram in characters and narrative. This is an evening that delivers comedy, and definitely values humour over subtlety.
- Hard Times is at Viaduct, Halifax, until 24 February. Box office: 01422 255266. Then touring.
