Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, Simon Callow
Simon Callow’s exciting new book Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World is due to be published on 7 February 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth. He is about to embark on a reading tour and he will be coming to Warwick Arts Centre to perform his sold-out show on 11 February 2012. We are delighted to be able to offer a sneak preview of Simon Callow’s forthcoming book:
The reading lasted three hours, with a ten-minute break. That would change, as would many other things. He immediately sensed the extraordinary potential of this form of acting. It was in fact an extension of his procedure as a writer. With Dickens, the reader is always conscious of his presence: the author is performing his characters. His daughter Mamie reported that when he was writing, he would leap up to the mirror to observe the expression on his face as the character’s words passed through his mind. Their utterances are brilliantly constructed performances, brilliantly shaped with a view to the reader’s reactions. Even the descriptive passages have the quality of arias, often, tellingly, falling into blank verse. And indeed, the books, as they appeared in their instalments, were frequently read aloud within family groups.
Given Dickens’s very particular gift as an actor, his incomparable mimicry and his fascination with transformation, performing his own texts in public was a perfect fusion of the narrator’s voice, delivered with unique authority, with Mathewsian monopolyloguing. Despite the relative lightness of his voice and the lisp that in the end, after long and arduous work, he almost completely eliminated, there has never been another author-reader even remotely as well-equipped to perform his own work. His experience with amateur productions in huge halls across the country had strengthened his vocal instrument and taught him how to fill the spaces with vocal energy, not simply relying on volume. His palpable joy in responding to the audience set the place on fire: it was genuine interaction, with real give and take. His listeners were not passive auditors of the master’s voice: they were participants.