Dickens the performer.

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Опубликовано: 01.06.2022, 08:27

Автор: МБЦ

Charles Dickens described himself as ‘an actor and a speaker from a baby’.He wrote his first play, Misnar, Sultan of India: a Tragedy at the age of six, playing the leading part and vigorously directing the neighbours’ children. At school in London, he acted in the plays and directed them; and as a young solicitors’ clerk, he sometimes performed in the Minor Theatres, where you could pay to play the role of your choice with a professional company.

He wrote a couple of slight and uncharacteristic plays for the West End, and continued writing burlesques to be performed by himself and his family, but it was not until 1842, when he was 30, that the urge to perform really seized him again, and he embarked on a series of very high level amateur productions with his close friend John Forster; the cast included some of the most famous writers and painters of the day.Dickens himself dazzled in a number of comic roles, but as he grew older and his view of the world darkened, he pushed his friend the novelist Wilkie Collins into writing tragic roles for him; his performance as the saturnine Richard Wardour in Collins’s The Frozen Deep astounded everyone who saw it, not least Queen Victoria, who always remembered it as the greatest performance she had ever seen in a theatre. Whether in high comedy or in tragedy, Dickens brought his inner needs to the performance; seemed compelled to act his life out in front of an audience.

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