Great expectations and a bleak house: the promise and perils of staging Dickens

London Tide at the National Theatre is the latest in a flood of Dickensian adaptations. Few have captured the novelist’s surreal imagination – are solo shows the most successful?

Dickens and theatre are forever linked. The latest adaptation of his work is London Tide, based by Ben Power on Our Mutual Friend – with songs by himself and PJ Harvey – and opening at the National Theatre in April. Given that the novel depicts a London where money is the measure of all things and the Thames is pitifully polluted, it seems a timely venture.

But, keenly as I await it, I suspect it will raise all the old questions about the problems and pleasures of dramatising Dickens. What is extraordinary is the deluge of Dickens adaptations over the decades. In his own lifetime, pirated versions of the novels were rushed on to the stage even while they were still being serialised: one adapter, WT Moncrieff, even challenged Dickens to end Nicholas Nickleby “better than I have done”. I also have a cherished copy of a 1952 book, Dickens the Dramatist, which itemises all the stage versions of his books up to that point. The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist head the popularity list with more than 25 entries each: the former includes an Esperanto version played in Cambridge in 1907 and the latter, long before Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, yielded an 1891 operetta simply called Bumble.