During the second intermission of Book-It's production of Charles Dickens's fictional account of the French Revolution, the world-historical event that many philosophers believe inaugurated the 19th century, a man standing behind me in a line leading to an unmanned coffee and cookie table said the most shocking thing to a woman I assumed to be his wife: "I have never read the novel before, but it must be long." The woman didn't correct the man, but instead sustained his ignorance: "Yes, it is a very long book."
A Tale of Two Cities is one of Dickens's shortest novels (around 100,000 words, whereas the usual length of his novels is around 400,000 words). But the problem is not so much that the man had no concept of the length of the novel, but that he had not read it before seeing the play. To walk into this performance with no prior knowledge of its content means two bad things: one, you will not understand what the hell is going on and two, you will miss the ultimate (and often the only) pleasure that Book-It productions have to offer—the pleasure of seeing and judging the playwright's edit of the primary text, the novel.
But before expanding these points, a quick review of the play: It's neither bad nor memorable. The adaptation was practical but not inspired. It included most of the story, but sacrificed what little poetry there is in the novel, making the play even more Spartan than the original. There are three strong performances, two of which are attributable to one actor (Brian Thompson as the kind English banker Jarvis Lorry and the heartless French aristocrat Marquis Evrémonde), and the other (Andrew DeRycke as the worldly and morbid hero Sydney Carton) more attributable to the fact that, as in the book, Carton is the only developed character. What is admirable about Thompson is his ability to capture the charms of Dickensian characters, both bad and good. The banker's good charm is that, though he claims to be about the business of making money and nothing else, he has the heart of a caring mother; with the Marquis Evrémonde, it is the bad charm of his supreme indifference to the suffering of those beneath his station. Without losing or modifying much, Thompson transfers the essence of these characters from the page to the stage.
The production, directed and co-adapted by Jane Jones, adds a wholly new character: Madame De Guillotine. She is supposed to be the spirit of the times, the death angel of The Terror, and is played by Annette Lefebvre, a woman who happens to share a surname with Henri Lefebvre, a great 20th-century French Marxist philosopher and theorizer about spaces produced by capital. The prime problem with this addition, Madame De Guillotine, is that she is too real. Lefebvre has a real French accent, whereas the other actors have fake French accents; when making an announcement before the start of the play, she pronounces entrance as "an-trance" instead of "in-trance"—so thick is her accent that Gallicisms like entrance return to their original source. (I actually believed she was French until an astute copyeditor corrected me.) The hard reality of her expert French repeatedly exposes the rest of the actors playing Parisian plebians as soft illusions.
Now, back to the man who was standing behind me in the coffee and cookie line during the second intermission. What he lost by being entirely ignorant of the book is, firstly, clarity. As all readers of the novel know, A Tale of Two Cities is dependent on wild and improbable coincidences. The reason for this dependency is the book's brevity and speed. In Dickens's longer and slower novels, which are usually set in one city, the coincidences are absorbed (or even obscured) by the rich details. But with A Tale of Two Cities, the extraordinarily large number of coincidences (exposed by short length and poverty of details) turns out to be more comic than cosmic. Add the high number of coincidences with the large number of characters played by a limited number of actors, and the result is confusion.
Lastly, the highest pleasure of a Book-It play is seeing how the playwright adapted the book. Missing this highest of pleasures means you will be left with, and lost in, the fog of the plot.
