By Rachel McMillan, guest blogger
I don’t want to admit I am Pip; but I am.
Every time I reread Great Expectations or revisit a favorite adaptation, I am reminded of the ugliness I would like to forget in myself, but which faces me head-on—the ugliness that narrator Pip retrospectively sees in himself. For Pip, when we meet him, is at the point in his life where, looking back and recounting his tale, he can pinpoint the exact moments where he failed, made mistakes, and saw the darkness in himself many of us would like to keep buried. Thus, not only is he a tried and reliable narrator (who else would want to admit their inexcusable behavior?), but also an invaluable guide on “What Not To Do.”
Every time I visit this story in any incarnation, I am struck by how much I have grown alongside it and learned from it: from my first opening its pages in my teenage years and being dropped into a Cinderella story, to my coming to rely on it as sustenance—character-building sustenance. One of the many things that Michael Shamata’s recent stage adaptation produced by the Soulpepper Theatre Co. in Toronto did well was remind me why Pip is such a crucial part of my life and experience.
This Pip (played magnificently from childhood to older adulthood by Jeff Lillico) broke the fourth wall and sullenly remarked on his own ingratitude, selfishness, and mistakes as they played out on stage. Pip leaves a lasting impression because he is willing to admit his failings. Though the story is told years down the road and we can assume after years of reflection, Pip here essentially recognizes his wrongdoings as they happen, creating a maze that leads him temporarily into destruction. It takes character to continually admit his failures while sometimes glossing over the moments of light that endear him to us.
When I wrote my review of this production on my blog, I mentioned that Lillico’s Pip maintained a dour countenance. Directorially speaking, this makes sense in an interpretation that meditates on Pip’s foibles as they occur.
The production transposed line after glorious, jubilant, sober, and serene line from the pages of the novel to the medium of the stage. This close interpretation allowed me to hear Pip and feel him and reflect on how much I see of him in me and, if we are honest, how much we all see of him in ourselves. Pip is my favorite Dickens character because Pip is, unfortunately, the one I most closely identify with.
When we read, we experience something apart, something intimate; but when the same lines are projected in a small, theatre-in-the-round space and our minds flit to comparable mistakes in our own lives, we can almost feel the heat sinking down through our collar, and we glance around to see if anyone has caught us feeling Pip’s ingratitude, showing Pip’s snobbish ways and easy cast-aside of his home and heritage.
Pip is humanity at its worst: a head turned by the glory of money, status, and fortune, by the belief that self-worth and love can be bought with the makings of a gentleman. But we also are given many other dual-natured characters who emblemize how society constructs us to act disingenuously. In addition to Pip, forsaking his community and connections, there’s also Wemmick, for whom an Aged Parent and domestic bliss at Walworth dissolve into spiels on portable property and harsh judgment during his tenure as Jaggers’s clerk. To a lesser and more humble extent we are given Joe Gargery (on stage perfectly understood by the modest and good Oliver Dennis) who doesn’t know how to act away from the forge –but who doesn’t seem to have a duplicitous bone in his body, who, instead, is aware of the societal expectations and constrictions that find him so out of place in London or at Satis House and away from his bellows, soot, and hammer.
It is a troubling thing to be met with such a mirror of your flaws. Soulpepper’s staged version excelled at presenting a Pip conscious of his past wrongdoing, yet still sewn up with redemptive threads, moments of light (Pip may have been lost to us for good without that redemptive moment where he beseeches Wemmick to aid him in anonymously setting up Herbert Pocket at Clarriker’s). The Pip we listen to is a Pip experienced and wise—who now cannot forget where he came from as easily as he tried to when he brushed the soot of the forge of his shoulders and traded in his thick boots and coarse hands for the top hat and airs of a gentleman. Likewise we, as audience-reader-partaker, cannot help but confront the darker side of our existence, the moments where we are caught by pride, arrogance, a need to be accepted, a desire to be rich in love and property, to raise ourselves, if not our character.
I’ve always said that the two greatest themes in Great Expectations are devoted and ridiculously undeserved love (Pip for Estella, Magwitch and Joe for Pip, Miss Havisham—kind of—for Compeyson) and grace: moments of sheer, pure, wonderful, earth-shattering, life-changing grace. But both of these are moot points if one cannot see, exposed in all its angry and troubling face, the foibles, failures and mistakes of our human fallacy. It’s this that I most appreciate about Soulpepper’s excellent stage adaptation.
Image copyright Cylla von Tiedemann for Soulpepper. Rachel McMillan blogs at A Fair Substitute for Heaven.
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