The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby was an 8½ hour-long adaptation of Charles Dickens’ 1839 novel, performed in two parts. Part 1 was 4 hours long with one interval of 15 minutes. Part 2 was 4½ hours with two intervals of 12 minutes. It was originally presented onstage over two evenings, or occasionally its entirety from early afternoon with a dinner break. Roger Rees played the title part. There was a cast of around forty playing over seventy parts.
It opened on 5 June 1980. The show ran for an 8-week season at the Aldwych Theatre. It was revived for two further 8-week runs at the Aldwych in the autumn season of 1980 and the spring season of 1981 before being filmed for Primetime TV at the Old Vic Theatre and transferring to Broadway for the autumn season of 1981. A further revival with a substantially different cast played at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford and toured to Los Angeles and Broadway in 1985. I saw the 1985 revival three times, twice at Stratford and once at Manchester.
When it opened, not all scenes in the play had been fully rehearsed, effectively what was being staged was a dress rehearsal. To apologise for this, the cast, in costume, greeted members of the audience as they arrived and explained the position and mention that they couldn’t be certain how long the event would last and that what was a long play anyway, would certainly overrun. This process of greeting by the cast was so much appreciated that it became a fixed feature of all performances.
Early performances did indeed overrun, initially by as much as an hour and public transport had frequently finished before the plays ended. Nonetheless, audiences stayed to the end and their reactions were extraordinary – curtain calls lasting upwards of fifteen minutes. Not all performances were sold out however, partly due to lukewarm reviews. This all changed when the Times journalist, Bernard Levin, published an article about the play. He said:
…not for many years has London’s theatre seen anything so richly joyous, so immoderately rife with pleasure, drama, colour and entertainment, so life-enhancing, yea-saying and fecund, so – in one word which embraces all these and more- so Dickensian… It is a celebration of love and justice that is true to the spirit of Dickens’ belief that those are the fulcrums on which the universe is moved, and the consequence is that we come out not merely delighted but strengthened, not just entertained by uplifted, not only affected but changed.
As soon as that article was published, the box office was flooded with ticket requests, and it was soon sold out – its success was now assured. This site includes the full performances that were filmed in 1981 and broadcast on what was then the new TV channel – C4. The are to be found here:
Further reading
This article about the play was published in 2021 as a tribute to Roger Rees:
This book, by Leon Rubin, who was assistant director, describes how the play came about; it is a wonderful record of a unique production and provides many insights into the workings of the theatre.