“Hard Times” was Dickens’ treatise on child-rearing and moral education. Written in 1854, it comes after “David Copperfield” and “Bleak House and before “Little Dorrit” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” and it has the distinction of being the only one of Dickens’ novels that F.R. Leavis thought made its author worthy of the name genius. Leavis, who dismissed Dickens generally as “a great entertainer,” initially omitted him from his pantheon of novelists in “the great tradition” of English fiction; only “Hard Times” did he find sufficiently taken up with “the moral preoccupations that characterize the novelist’s peculiar interest in life.” In the parallel stories of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby, both of “Coketown,” Dickens takes the self-interested habit of mind to its logical conclusion, showing us where it can lead. In Bounderby, the self-made industrialist, it leads to the persecution and death of the honest, hardworking factory hand Stephen Blackpool. In Thomas Gradgrind, the pragmatist schoolmaster, it leads to the near-destruction of his children: young Tom grows up a liar and a thief and ends by framing an innocent man for a crime he himself committed; Louisa, having entered into a loveless marriage with Bounderby, almost commits adultery. “‘Hard Times,’” Leavis began in an essay on the novel, “is not a difficult work.” Nor it is. An attack on Benthamite utilitarianism, almost schematic in its design, the novel pits two moralities against each other: the literal realism of Gradgrind’s schoolroom and the fanciful spontaneity of Mr. Sleary’s “horse-riding.” Gradgrind’s own children come to grief; only Sissy Jupe, the abandoned circus child Gradgrind ambivalently adopts, turns out a mensch.
The stage adaptation of “Hard Times” at Theater 890 is the second production in the Joyce Theater Foundation’s 1987 American Theater Exchange. Directed by Richard E.T. White, it comes to us (via the Berkeley Repertory Theater) from England, where it was written by Stephen Jeffreys for the Pocket Theater in Cumbria. The press release and advertising handbills for “Hard Times” distributed by the American Theater Exchange refer to Mr. Jeffreys variously as “Stephen Jeffreys of the Royal Shakespeare Company” and “The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stephen Jeffreys.” I called up the press office to ask in what capacity Mr. Jeffreys is affiliated with the R.S.C. Mr. Jeffreys, it turned out, had no knowledge of any long-term association; the R.S.C. had once bought him a cup of coffee.
The Berkeley Repertory Theater’s “Hard Times” is an honest attempt to re-create the spirit and the theatricality of the R.S.C.’s landmark production of “Nicholas Nickleby.” It uses many of “Nickleby”’s techniques: music, movement, and a nonrealistic style of theater that acknowledges the presence of the audience. Actors play multiple roles and tell the story through a combination of dramatization and narrative. John Bonard Wilson’s set is a hodgepodge of Dickensian images: here a gaslight, there a nineteenth-century factory widow. Mr. Sleary’s horse-riding is evoked by a couple of backcloths painted to look like Victorian circus posters, and Bounderby’s textile mill by the top of a large power loom. The clothes hanging out to dry seem gray with coal dust, and on a screen behind one section of the audience the industrial chimneys of Coketown send webs of smoke across an evening sky. By staging the play in the round, the production seeks to put us in the world of Coketown, much as “Nicholas Nickleby” seemed to put us in the worlds of London, Portsmouth, and Yorkshire. (The company has roped off the seating area in the proscenium theater and placed the audience on the stage proper.)
Where the production most resembles “Nickleby” is in the idea of casting actors in roles that, as far as possible, contrast with or comment on one another. Just as the same actress in “Nickleby” played the objectionable Mrs. Squeers and the lovable Mrs. Crummles, so in “Hard Times” the same actor, Laurence Ballard, plays the objectionable Bounderby and the lovable Mr. Sleary; Jarion Monroe plays both the tyrannical schoolmaster Gradgrind and the martyred workingman Blackpool; and the actress who plays Louisa, Patricia Hodges, also plays Blackpool’s derelict alcoholic wife. There is certain amount of “thematic” doubling as well. Since Mr. Monroe also plays Mr. Harthouse, a visual connection is drawn between Louisa’s father and her would-be seducer. Kathleen Chalfant, who plays both Sissy Jupe and the spiteful Mrs. Sparsit, thus embodies both the pillar Louisa leans upon and the woman who tries to bring her down.
Of the New York cast, only Mr. Ballard, Mr. Monroe, and Jeffrey Bihr, who plays young Tom Gradgrind, are members of the Berkeley Repertory Theater; Miss Chalfant and Miss Hodges were brought in to replace the female members of the company who were unavailable. All of them do remarkably well, considering that they are trying to accomplish with five actors what the R.S.C. did with over forty. Mr. Jeffreys’ adaptation closely follows the design of the novel—each of the three acts corresponds to one of Dickens’ three books—and affords the actors an opportunity to display the full range of their considerable talents. The fact remains, though, that out of Dickens’ comparatively short novel Mr. Jeffreys has fashioned a very long evening of theater. The performance lasts three and a quarter hours, and leaves you not with images of Mr. Sleary and Coketown but with the memory of an audience dwindling like the musicians in Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, and of a straggling line of people shuffling dutifully—like Gradgrind’s pupils—back into the theatre after each intermission.
One problem is that with just five actors no one can produce the sort of environmental theatre that “Nickleby” exemplifies; it needs a great many people rushing around doing a great many things very fast, so that a world grows up around us without our quite knowing how. In “Hard Times,” there is much rushing about (particularly on the part of poor Mr. Bihr, who has to double as young Tom Gradgrind and the company’s entire orchestra) and an effort to evoke the sense of an environment that we are a part of: Gradgrind addresses members of the audience in his schoolroom lecture, agitators call out to one another from the aisles at a union meeting, and a midnight rescue is carried on with lanterns in the dark around us. But the Berkeley Repertory Theatre doesn’t create a world around us; it can’t.
Of all Dickens’ novels, “Hard Times” is perhaps the least susceptible to stage adaptation. It is not—like “Nickleby” or “Oliver Twist” or “Edwin Drood”—primarily a melodrama but a roman à thèse: its drama takes place on an intellectual plane. With the exception of Louisa, its characters are meant to interest us not because of what they do or experience but because of what they represent. And Louisa’s salient characteristics—impassivity and a depressive froideur—are qualities that do not lend themselves to stage representation. A more narrative medium—film or television—might be able to render them in closeup. On the stage of Theatre 890, Louisa is reduced to a stereotypical Dickensian heroine. None of which is to belittle the virtuosity or the stalwart spirit of the Berkeley Repertory Theater. With what it has been given the company performs acts of near-heroism. But nothing in Mr. Jeffreys’ adaptation is the least bit theatrical—except for the one liberty he takes with the original text: an entirely invented character, Mary Stokes, who makes an impassioned speech against capitalism and industry at a union rally. (Dickens was in fact ambivalent about trade unionism, and has drawn fire from critics—Leavis among them—for the unsympathetic picture he paints of union agitation in the chapter this scene is based on.) At a pub theater in England, “Hard Times” perhaps seemed like stirring “workers’ theater.” Transplanted to Theater 890, where the Joyce Foundation sells Krön chocolates for a dollar a piece at intermission, its rhetoric falls a bit flat.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, June 20, 1987