The week in theatre: London Tide; The Comeuppance; Gunter – review

Lyttelton; Almeida; Royal Court Upstairs, London
All of London life doesn’t quite materialise in an epic take on Dickens with music by PJ Harvey; a university reunion digs deep at the Almeida; and a 17th-century witch hunt comes alive in an Edinburgh hit

London theatre is going gargantuan. Is this a reaction against rapid, let’s-not-breathe-the-same-air-for-too-long pandemic plays? Is it a need for all-embracing stories, a hope that there is something that lasts longer than an individual life or a government? This month, Long Day’s Journey into Night took on the far reaches of family memory while Player Kings compacted huge Shakespearean histories. Now London Tide tackles the surge and despair of the capital. This is another three-hour-plus evening.

Ben Power has adapted Dickens’s mighty Our Mutual Friend, efficiently filleting heir-marriage-murder plots into a series of quick scenes on Bunny Christie’s obsidian set. He has tilted the action towards the novel’s moral and social concerns rather than its fugitive weirdness, has given the female characters larger says and trimmed some satirical glories: the nouveaux-riches Veneerings don’t make the cut. One of the chief threats of Dickens stagings – reduction to a series of capering grotesques that might be called Dickensian – is avoided. Bella Maclean and Tom Mothersdale are particularly astute: Maclean with a crystalline voice and a troubled sulkiness; Mothersdale using to the hilt his capacity for making the vestigial into a peculiarly compelling quality.