Dehydrated Dickens

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 549, 30 December 1949, Page 8

Dehydrated Dickens

severely during parts of the film version of Great Expectations, I sat down to the radio adaptation quite prepared to snarl furiously at any blatant tampering or off-kef¥ interpretation. But Mabel Constandutos and Howard Agg have turned in a workmanlike script and my feelings weren’t too lacerated. All the same.... In this particular episode Herbert Pocket meets Pip for the first time and initiates him into the niceties of table manners. One criticism of the film had been that Pip was too gentlemanly right from the start. One could not quite beliéve that the Pip of Mr. John Mills was 86 much the blacksmith’s apprentice that he could put his knife in his mouth, or that the "attitude of opening oysters on the part of the left elbow" came naturally to that member. Over the air, Pip’s diffident marsh county accent was convincing and the idea of inept table manners not incongruous. After that we had a short interview with Mr. Jaggers, and then, rather suddenly, we were ‘taken to Mt. Wemmick’s Castle. The script fell down here because there was too much to take ih, in too short a time. I doubt if atiyone who had not read the book woiild get anything like a comprehensive picture of Mr. Wemmick’s establishment, although the bit with Wemmick, Pip and the Aged P. all chuckling and nodding together like mad was in the right tradition. The episode ended with Joe’s visit to Pip, now firmly set up as a young man of fashion. Laidman Brown was excellent as Joe (as was Bernard Miles in the film) but evefything happened too quickly. There was no gradual transition or evolution of character, so that in the beginning we had Pip as a simple country boy, and not fhany minutes later we had him as a complicated town snob, with little or nothing in between to hint at the reason for his transformation. E suffered . rather

In the adaptation of any major work, the main characters must carry the story and we have to expect some heads to fall. Minor characters which take their placés hattirally in the book can become irrévelanties over the aif, but so much of the essential Dickens is in the minor charactefs and so often his main people are such sticks, such puppets, that, take out the Wopsles and the Pumplechooks,

/ the Trabb’s boys and the Avengers, and what is left? Quite often a fearsome melodrama and a mass of sentiment. An adaptation, even a good one like this, can otily be a digest. Thefe are some Classic examples of the written word which .defy translation into any other medium. True, this snippet of Great Expectations might send someone who

has not hitherto read it, to the bookcase; it might open up fresh fields of interest or enlightenment, but I doubt if the original pufpose of any radio adaptation is ever quite so evangelical.

-Sycorax