Dickens' tale still relevant today

After three and one-half hours of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, we left the Timms Centre with an indelible image.

That while this Dickensian saga illuminates the festering sores that scarred an otherwise elegant Victorian England, the need for social justice is still a vast haunting cry sounded across the world today. It is a production that definitely challenges our moral stance and treatment of those around us and implores us to be kinder and gentler towards those less fortunate.

In this Studio Theatre adaptation by Toronto critic Richard Ouzounian, families are torn apart and the comfortably affluent are thrown into the seedy world of the working poor. But in the end there’s a certain comfort in knowing families are reunited, couples brought together and evildoers punished for their misdeeds.

The sheer magnitude of Charles Dickens’ novel runs about 900 pages. In this dynamic version, 16 actors — 12 of whom are University of Alberta graduating bachelor of fine arts students — play more than 100 roles.

Getting this mammoth production up and running like clockwork was a Herculean task for director Brian Deedrick. As artistic director for Edmonton Opera, Deedrick creates sleight of hand magic and in Nicholas Nickleby, he exhibits a clear sense of direction and a strong theatrical imagination that combines gloss, grit and straight-ahead melodrama.

As with many of his other stories, Dickens’ characters are not terribly complex. They either walk the path of angelic goodness or are fully tarred by evil.

The play starts when the naive Nicholas (Jamie Cavanagh) and his sister Kate (Nicola Elbro) go to London after their father’s unexpected death. In the company of their mother (St. Albert’s own Kyla Shinkewski) they beg their wealthy and imperious Uncle Ralph (Ted Sloan) for assistance. Before they can blink, he involves his principled nephew and virginal niece in his avaricious schemes.

Kate is sent to work in a millinery shop and Nicholas is sent to teach at Wackford Squeers’ (Matt Brault) academy in Yorkshire, a school for the disabled, mentally challenged and illegitimate. However, Squeers and his malevolent wife pocket the money and treat the children as slaves.

Torn by the violence and cruelty he witnesses, Nicholas saves one particular boy, Smike (Chad Drever), from a particularly brutal beating. They escape and join a Shakespearean troupe that introduces some hilarious comic relief and delightful swordplay.

There are many fine performances: Cavanagh’s Nicholas, the earnest young man always doing the right thing; Shinkewski’s Mrs. Nickleby, a genteel matriarch whose world has been turned upside down; Sloan’s Uncle Ralph, a man who daily trades his moral compass for wealth and Brault’s Squeers, a degenerate of the worst kind.

And of course there is Drever’s Smike, a vulnerable, child-like innocent that evokes both pathos and comedy. It is his violent treatment that grabs our hearts and makes us weep.

Purists may lament a missing plot twist or two, but this complicated tale covers a lot of bases, reminding us there is always hope embedded in misery.