By Cody M. Quanbeck, guest blogger
I wasn’t initially sure I would listen to the new audio dramatization of David Copperfield from director Sam Mendes and adapter Marty Ross, since I wasn’t a fan of their adaptation of Oliver Twist. What ultimately convinced me to give it a try was the casting of Helena Bonham Carter as Betsey Trotwood. In my experience, Bonham Carter can be a very charismatic performer, but I had a hard time picturing her as the character. That’s the beauty of audio dramas, however. To my mind, Helena Bonham Carter may not look physically intimidating enough to be Betsey Trotwood, but that doesn’t occur to me while I’m listening to her stellar vocal performance. (Sadly, though not surprisingly, this adaptation doesn’t give the character the emotional arc she had in the book, but that’s not the actress’s fault.)
The cast’s other standout is Richard Armitage, who sounds awesomely creepy as Mr. Murdstone. Ncuti Gatwa is also great as the title character. (When that character is an adult, that is. Reece Kenwyne Mpudzi voices him as a child.)
But not everyone is so well cast. Rhiannon Clements sounds too mature to be Dora Spenlow, making the character’s occasional brattishness and general immaturity less tolerable than they should be. To be fair, though, the problem there may lie more with the writing than the acting.
Ah, the writing.
I’m not a fan of adaptations of Charles Dickens that use his stories to give their own, more modern critiques of his society. I don’t want to be too hard on them, since it’s as silly to criticize modern stories for having modern morality as it is to criticize Victorian stories for having Victorian morality—and anyway, Dickens’s books were always meant as social critiques, making it hard for adapters to resist including their own criticisms. But I feel like some adaptations use Dickens as a Trojan horse for preaching their own themes, which often have nothing to do with the original books. To be fair, this David Copperfield isn’t nearly as bad in that respect as Guy Pearce’s miniseries adaptations of A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations, but at times it’s in much the same spirit. (So was Mendes and Ross’s Oliver Twist.)
Sometimes this adaptation’s revisionist takes on the characters can work well, such as when Emily resists returning to her uncle not because she fears he won’t forgive her but because she says the reason he forgives is that he only sees her as the innocent girl in his head. (Though the drama returns to that well too often, if you ask me.) Less successful is the portrayal of James Steerforth (Theo James) as gay. I can understand interpreting the character that way in the book, given how he expresses a wish for his friend, David, to have a sister and nicknames him Daisy. (It’s also worth noting that in his first-person narration, David rhapsodizes as much about Steerforth’s charm and beauty as those of the various women who capture his heart.) I can see myself enjoying an adaptation that had the idea as a subtext, but this audio drama is allergic to subtext and wants everything to be text. (More on this below.) When David and Steerforth have a final meeting not in the book where Steerforth tries to kiss David, I think we can say this adaptation has dived into crazy fanfiction territory!
Along similarly modern lines, the radio drama uses Dora to criticize the education given to young gentlewomen in her society. I think this is a bit of a stretch, mainly because the ideals for Victorian woman included being ultracompetent housekeepers. There’s definitely a case to be made, though, that other aspects of the way they were educated made it harder rather than easier for women to attain this ideal. And anyway, this is still less ridiculous than using Steerforth to illuminate the psyches of repressed homosexuals in 19th-century England. My problem is more with how articulate and rebellious the script makes Dora herself to make its point.
In the book, Dora is definitely more self-aware about her limitations than she initially seems, but she’s only able to really articulate them on her deathbed. The audio drama has her diagnose herself long before that. This is in keeping with how the adaptation has the characters constantly discuss their own psyches and speculate on how their backstories made them who they are. The book had scenes of them doing that too, and there’s nothing wrong with it once in a while. But this adaptation has so many of such scenes that it starts to feel annoyingly like a giant group therapy session. I know the book isn’t exactly subtle. Readers can easily see what Dickens wanted us to infer about the characters. But at least it can be said that we were supposed to infer those things. The characters didn’t regularly psychoanalyze themselves out loud for our benefit.
For all that this radio drama takes a modern perspective on things like gender and sexuality, it’s written in a very flowery, 19th-century style. That’s admirable in a way, and sometimes it works well. Much of the dialogue between David and Dora is hilariously witty. But after a while, it starts to feel like Ross is patting himself on the back over his wit, and the style becomes tiresome. It’s true that Dickens tended to be overly wordy by modern standards, but he knew how to be wordy!
It probably sounds like I utterly hate this adaptation, but that’s not true. While I consider the subplot of Steerforth and the Peggotty family to be more bad than good, the subplot of Uriah Heep (Jack Lowden) and the Micawbers (Toby Jones and Katy Wix) I’d say is more good than bad, and, as I’ve indicated, Dora’s subplot is a mixed bag. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t praise this version of David Copperfield for including David’s youthful crushes on Miss Shepherd and Miss Larkins. As peripheral as they are to the story, they’re hilarious, and they serve to develop Agnes Wickfield (Izuka Hoyle) as David’s confidant. There are enough great things about this adaptation to make me glad I listened to it once, but there are enough not-so-great things to keep me from revisiting it anytime soon.
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