Rapid-fire version of old favourite

DAVID COPPERFIELD, Oldham Coliseum (to February 23).
A NEW season and an old favourite: Dickens is about tortured lives with feelgood resolutions, and Copperfield pretty much fits the bill.

As director Kevin Shaw effectively acknowledges in the programme, anyone attempting to condense the 700-page novel into a two-hour stage drama is on something of a hiding to nothing.

As it turns out, Alastair Cording’s script is 70 pages long — a neat, 10 dense pages of the novel to every loose page of the script. So what stays, and what doesn’t?

Well, the major incidents remain, as do all the major characters, but in most other respects a mass of detail and character are cut.

We could hardly have it any other way: the last Dickens adaptation to receive true stage justice was Nicholas Nickleby, and that ran for nine hours.

Back to Copperfield: in place of character we get a rapid-fire run of scenes whose pace is rarely allowed to flag. Much of the time this is welcome, but the overriding impression left is of a show in a hurry.

The pace is perhaps too even: I’d have liked a bit more time for some scenes to develop, while others could have been dispensed with even more quickly.

But there is no doubting the commitment of all concerned: the eight-strong cast — Keiran Buckeridge, Isabel Ford, Joanna Higson, Helen Kay, Jo Mousley, Robin SImpson, Tim Treslove and Jack WIlkinson — handle many characters (in fact Wilkinson plays only David) and generally acquit themselves very entertainingly.

Wilkinson is innocent and much put-upon as David; Tim Treslove is good whether playing the unpleasant Murdstone, salt of the earth Peggotty or blustering Micawber and the rest get more humanity into their characters than the script sometimes allows.

But rising above them is Keiran Buckeridge, with the character gift that is Heep. From his first entrance (up through a clothing chest, via a stage trap), he imbues Heep with the necessary mix of obsequiousness and creepiness and makes a lot out of a little.

Set designer Alison Heffernan has created a lovely all-purpose set on which packing cases and chests form much of the furniture, while a generic shrubbery backdrop is actually much more attractive and appropriate than it sounds.