Charles Dickens'
A Christmas Carol

And

An Evening with Dickens

"It’s a treat to see Turney, creating not only Dickens, but a whole gallery of upper- and lower-class characters, each with a distinctive voice and impeccable accent." ---Marianne Evett, The Plain Dealer

"Using only the words of Charles Dickens and the suggestion of a set, Turney populates the stage with crones, curmudgeons, cockneys and other characters." --Teddi Gibson-Bianchi, The Sun Newspapers

Live Solo Performances by
Emmy-Award Winner Wayne S. Turney

About Dickens' Readings and "The Carol"

Charles Dickens work has always been adapted to the stage even in his own lifetime, sometimes before the novels were completely finished and published in serial form. There was a production of A Christmas Carol on the boards in London in the same year it came out. Dickens was so popular a writer in his own day that in 1845, there were twelve different productions of another of his Christmas stories, The Cricket on the Hearth, in various London theatres during the holidays. This truly ludicrous proliferation was made possible by a peculiarity in the copyright laws of the day and a strange reluctance on Dickens' part to adapt his own works to the stage.

The copyright laws in England were a jumble through most of the nineteenth century. The great statesman and mediocre novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton had sponsored the first bill to regularize the application of Common Law to the peculiar case of dramatic works in the Dramatic Copywright Act of 1833. One of the provisions of the act was the creation of the "copywright performance." It was thought that rights to a dramatic piece could be lost if the manuscript was published before it was performed, so actors were hired to give public readings of the plays without scenery or costumes before copies were published. This was apparently unnecessary, but the wording of the so-called Bulwer-Lytton Act was sufficiently ambiguous that few were willing to take chances.

A considerable amount of litigation and revision ensued and a workable legal solution was not hit upon until 1861 when, in Reade v. Lacy, J & H 524, it was held that an author could retain the theatrical rights of an adaptation of his own work by adapting it himself and publishing it as a "dramatic piece." There was no international copyright agreement with the United States, so the hugely popular works of Charles Dickens were freely pirated on this side of the Atlantic, perhaps the most successful adaptation being Dion Boucicault's Dot, taken from The Cricket on the Hearth.

It is a strange paradox that Dickens did not successfully adapt his own major works for the stage. He certainly did not lack facility in writing things, nor did he lack the necessary knowledge of the stage. When Dickens was a young man he had seriously considered becoming an actor. His amateur portrayals of Captain Bobadil and Shallow made those who saw him declare that he would have made a fine eccentric comedian. He may have acted with the famous T. D. Davenport at the Portsmouth theatre: he surely used the Davenports as the model for the Crummles, young Jean Davenport being the Infant Phenomenon in life. He was a lifelong friend of perhaps the greatest actor of his age, William Charles Macready. Dickens even had a small theatre "perfectly fitted up" in his London residence, Tavistock House, where two of Wilkie Collins' plays were previewed before successful London runs. As early as 1836, Dickens wrote a successful burletta, The Strange Gentleman, for the stage of John Braham's new St. James Theatre. It was his own dramatization of one of the Sketches by Boz, "The Great Winglebury Duel." The little piece was a success, running for over fifty nights, a very respectable run for its day. Indeed, the St. James had its first commercial success with this production. But his next effort, the libretto for a ballad opera called The Village Coquettes, had a run on only twenty nights to poor business.

At 25, Dickens was already the successful author of the wildly successful Pickwick Papers: he was working on Oliver Twist. The less sure role of dramatist may well have been one he simply did not want to tackle when success was so apparently easy in another field less dependent on the performance skills of others.
The theatre held an irresistible pull for him though. He collaborated with Wilkie Collins on No Thoroughfare, a production that featured Ben Webster and the "blond-wigged Hamlet," Charles Fechter. Still, he left the adaptation of his own works to others, the Christmas Books to Albert Smith, for example, who of course, reaped the benefits. Edward Stirling and W.T. Moncrieff between them adapted the bulk of the rest of Dickens' stories and novels for the stage. The only novel he himself adapted for the stage was Great Expectations. His version was never acted.

Dickens' undoubted love for the theatre and his relative lack of success in dramatizing his own works may help to explain why Dickens chose to embark on his famous series of "readings." Charles Dickens took to the platform roughly 470 times reading his own works! By far the most popular piece in his repertory was what he referred to as "The Carol": he "read" it in more than a quarter of the programs he gave from December 27, 1853 to his farewell performance on March 15, 1870.
Due to its great length, Dickens made several cuttings of "The Carol" over the years so that more than one piece could be presented during his two hours' traffic on the stage. But apparently, he rarely, if ever, repeated the same performance twice, even of the same program. In 1868, he wrote from his American tour, "I have got to know "The Carol" so well that I can't remember it, and occasionally go dodging about in the wildest manner to pick up the lost pieces." This Is not to suggest that the audience did not get its money's worth. The critic for the Manchester Examiner noted, "there is always a freshness about what Mr. Dickens does-one reading is never anything like a mechanical following of a previous reading, even of the same work-and we dare say that many who, like ourselves, heard the Christmas Carol on Saturday night for the third or fourth time enjoyed it at least as much as on the first hearing."

Happily the dog-eared copy of "The Carol" that Dickens used as his "prompt copy" is preserved at the New York Public Library. It was this version, with Dickens' own cuts and rewritten transitions, that David Gooding and I recorded for the Cleveland Play House at Christmastime fifteen years ago. A few of those tapes are still around. And it is that same cutting-with a few of my own favorite bits put back in-that I am reading around Christmas time again.

And it was another Christmas nearly a decade ago that saw my own first attempt at recreating Dickens' platform performances. The fledgling Cleveland Theatre Company was in need of a holiday offering to keep its name and profile above the horizon. But alas, budgetary and time constraints prohibited a lavish production with a lengthy rehearsal time, and so the inveterate Thomas Q. Fulton and I hit on recreating Dickens platform readings in a piece we cleverly named "A Dickens Christmas." Most of what I read during that run was from the Christmas Books. But through the good offices of Robert Finn and his hardy group of Dickens aficionados I began adding more and more of Dickens' incomparable prose to the mix so that now I can offer to the public two full-length programs, A Christmas Carol and An Evening with Dickens. Each runs about two hours, but can be as brief as 88 minutes or as long as the traffic will allow. Just as in Dickens' time, the programs are portable and can be adapted to any size hall, from intimate to grandiose.

To book a performance (which may even include a snippet or two of other of Dicken's Books) contact me well in advance of the date you'd like. To check on dates and get a quote click here.

(215)997-6394

If you are interested, you can e-mail Mr. Turney.