FringeReview UK 2025

David Copperfield

Guildford Shakespeare Company and Jermyn Street Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, classical, Comedy, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Puppetry, Theatre

Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

The Guildford Shakespeare Company enjoy strong ties with Jermyn Street Theatre, and after their exhilarating Pride and Prejudice last year they bring Abigail Pickard Price’s latest adaptation. Dickens’ 1850 novel David Copperfield is seasonal bliss. A non-Christmas Carol that carries much of that merry charge in this production: one of vivid characters, affirmation, joy, tragedy, redemption and happiness. Directed too by Pickard Price it runs till December 20. It must be said at once this is a five-star hit, the most brilliant festive production at Jermyn Street I can remember.

The commanding Luke Barton returns – and had a hand in the development. He appears along with Louise Beresford and Eddy Payne – who plays David Copperfield throughout as the other two pirouette a gallimaufry of roles, pinafores and pantaloons around him. This is a far more active production than previously, befitting Dickens’ own hyperactive imagination. It’s not just the pace of storytelling  – 900 pages of novel is over three times an Austen length. But teeming eccentricities and thus stage details. Some storytelling can be accomplished with a minimum. But Dickens here demands an overflow of inventive theatre business. And gets it. On several levels this is beyond even the excellence of last year’s production.

The miracle of this adaptation stamps not just the novel’s outlines but its picaresque thrust. In two-hours-fifteen with interval, Pickard Price fillets Dickens into this gem of compression. Virtually all is quotation. Its nuances and distractions – always allowing snips from asides we never remember anyway – is remarkably full, despite the comedy. Within the inherent farce of a three-hander development, remarkably little violence is done to its sashaying dash and sentiment. Dickens always lends himself to dramatic adaptation and of course adapted his own work, though not apparently this “favourite child” of his invention. He would surely have enjoyed this.

Payne makes an engaging Copperfield, and looks like Dickens. Possessing both warmth and affect he engages as he’s immersed back into his earlier self. There’s nuances from childhood innocence and terror contrasting the way for instance Payne modulates sternness and all kinds of un-Copperfield territory: exasperation with Dora, ferocity with Heep, bewilderment and anger at Steerforth and bafflement with the suddenly stand-offish Micawber. Finally a release like a benediction with Agnes, which is genuinely moving.

Payne’s smaller frame is placed up against the towering Barton who plays Peggotty, Ham, Creakle the schoolmaster, the evil Murdstone, Micawber with a fantastical vocabulary, the slurring Wickfield, a tragic and softer Mrs Steerforth and in a magical distrait manner, Mr Dick. Who’s usually attached to a kite, where his and King Charles’ wits are flown aloft. It’s not just the stencilling of these well-worn characters but the fact that two cast-members have to shift in and out of costumes within 30 seconds.

Beresford swirls as formidable stick-waving Miss Betsey Trottwood, convinced she’ll see a niece born with her name, only to be enraged by the child being a boy (it’s remarkable how David is so frequently christened with other names: “Daisy” by Steerforth, “Trot” by his aunt). She’s also David’s sweet if fragile mother Clara, and contrastingly vulpine but affable Steerforth: in which she excels with a vulnerable exuberance. The moment when Steerforth foresees his own actions and knows he’s hurtling to self-destruction is adroitly handled. There’s brief roles as nodding baby-armed Mrs Micawber and oil-skinned hearty Mr Peggotty (dwarfed by sister Peggotty). Beresford exalts though as a wheedling or hissing Uriah Heep; the cringeworthy “child-wife” Dora, buying into her own learned helplessness which includes exorbitant swordfish; and the aspiring Emily, suddenly out of her depth (as prefigured in the swimming scene as she unfurls herself). And finally as earnest, far-too-faithful and impossibly warm-hearted Agnes. It’s as if Dickens was already drawing up his future mistress Ellen Ternan, for whom he’d eventually leave his wife.

Neil Irish’s set is a teal-and-baby blue and turquoise-lit backdrop of fenestrated doors alternating with windows, where Mark Dymock’s lighting subtly plays virid greens in sea scenes, reds and russets, shifting between Yarmouth and lit interiors. Irish’s period costume design dazzles. This a serious wardrobe guyed by occasional coat-hanger acting as additional characters are brought on as single hat and suit (Murdstone in particular). The backstage miracle of rapid change is aided by associate designer and supervisor Anett Black. In the foreground a globe drinks cabinet, a few period chairs and trunks are all that’s needed. Except – a dress that unfurls to become a long emerald-wound sea from Emily’s skirt. Or a miniature Punch-and-Judy theatre held in front of his head by Barton, voicing – and manipulating – the forbidding Spenlow with his catch-phrase “over my dead body” popping out as a puppet Punch till he’s run over by a puppet horse.

In Matt Eaton’s adroitly-shaped sound design there’s tiny snatches of the famous ‘Amelie’ waltz to point up Dora’s Frenchified jaunts; and period arrangements. Starting with a lone violin it moves into sea-shanties and the lighter classical world of the 1830s. 

An outstanding production, a seasonal offering more satisfying than most pantos. And with a warm heart that transmutes Dickens’ creations into something like the dazzle and crackle of his imagination.

Associate Designer and Costume Supervisor Anett Black, Lighting Associate Sound Designer Anna Wood, Movement Director Amy Lawrence, Fight Director Philip d’Orleans, Company Stage and Production Manager Hannah Walker, ASM Vicky Jukes, DSM Phoebe Buckland, Rehearsal ASM Christinne-Jenifer Felkin, Co-Producers Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches

PR Kate Morley PR, Photography Steve Gregson, Artwork Dreamfly

Published November 27, 2025November 27, 2025 by Simon Jenner