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The rest of the week he's a pen-pushing clown
I have still not really posted about The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. (The short version: it's amazing. Someone needs to repackage the Region 1 DVDs. Anyone interested, I will gladly watch the entire production again.) But ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving asked me to post about one of the characters I have been bending her ear about, so here he is.
I had several reasons for wanting to see Nicholas Nickleby. One was the chance to see Roger Rees in a leading role; I had noticed him in a small part in The Prestige (2006), after which he kept turning up as a character actor and never onscreen for more than ten minutes unless you count the original cast recording of Flaherty and Ahrens' A Man of No Importance (2002), which one still can't watch. Another was the staging: eight and a half hours of forty actors making up over a hundred and thirty roles and seven hundred pages with changes of light and voice and the props you can plainly see on the walls or tables when not in use. And a third was the presence of Edward Petherbridge, who in the absence of an alt-historical Leslie Howard is the only actor I can picture as Lord Peter Wimsey; Greer had told me he was playing Newman Noggs, which meant nothing to me. "You would very much like him, I think. Quirky, melancholic, kind, and very shabby." All of the above turned out to be true. What she failed to tell me was that he was also completely awesome.
(I don't think I can satisfactorily summarize Nicholas Nickleby in two sentences. It's a novel by Charles Dickens, which means that if it's not A Christmas Carol or filmed by David Lean, there's no way to get it all in under two hours—Wikipedia doesn't even try. For the purposes of this entry, suffice it to say that Nicholas is our headstrong hero, Smike the defenseless drudge he rescues from a cold hell of a Yorkshire school, Ralph Nickleby his uncle whose ill-treatment of Nicholas' family drives the whole massive concatenation of plot, and Newman Noggs his beaten-down clerk, "a sallow-faced man in rusty brown." Be warned that I have not yet read the novel; all my referents are David Edgar and Trevor Nunn. But I have a copy, and I'll probably post about that, too, someday. To continue—)
For a drunken ex-gentleman with one of the world's most permanently woebegone expressions, Newman Noggs is surprisingly effective. It is in character that he should sympathize with Nicholas and Smike in their flight from Dotheboys Hall, but it does not automatically follow that he should then provide them with somewhere to stay, a paying situation (however short-lived), and other windfalls of much-needed practical as well as moral support; it is even less predictable that he should become the fragile, funny, resolute force for good he does in the play's last act. In most and too many respects, he's a pushover. He's never met a drink he won't finish; he'll go behind Ralph Nickleby's back, but he's never crossed the moneylender outright; he can't even evict the neighbor who cozies himself right up at the expense of Newman's coal. He's full of half-finished gestures, sentences that trail off or stop themselves short: he cancels them before someone else can. (Half of what he says is in his hands, anyway: waving things off, holding them in.) He's good at simply not doing things, but very bad at saying no. And yet he's gentler and more true than almost anyone else onstage, in his stop-and-start, regretful way. It's almost miraculous. What we are allowed to glimpse of his interior life is heartbreaking, as in the letter he slips Nicholas: "Forgive errors: I have forgotten all my old ways. My spelling may have gone with them . . . I was a gentleman then. I was indeed."1 He is not a dreamer, for all his distraction—indeed, he's probably more of a realist than his master, who seems to preserve the illusion that money is the solution to all secrets. "I know the world," Ralph boasts, "and the world knows me." Newman says only, poignantly, "I know the world." But somehow there's no cynicism in his wreck; his present reduced circumstances make him all the more protective of others. And therefore a very suitable genius for Nicholas, a still flickering complement to the boy's bare-knuckle fire: "Damn it, I'm proud of you—I'd have done the same myself!"2
But I repeat that almost, because a miracle would be insufferable and Newman Noggs is no plaster saint. He may be3 the most physically constructed part in the play—Petherbridge must have trained as a dancer or a mime, because he is recognizable in a crowd by his body language alone. There is an entire character in the way he carries himself, half apologetic and half careless, like a halting heron, with his past always around his shoulders like the shawl he wraps in because he cannot afford a topcoat anymore. Small gestures, like the exasperated snap-shut of a ledger or the conversation-closing replacement of his hat on his head, delineate his temper more precisely than his staccato remarks. It is no surprise that his performance includes bits of actual mime, some of which are in service of the mise-en-scène (as when we watch him squeeze down the narrow corridor between his office and his master's, which is of course plain air; stampeded by impatient clients, he is shoved up against the fourth wall) and others of Newman Noggs' feelings (as when he enacts an imaginary thrashing of his employer or daydreams of force-feeding him one of every coin of the realm). He has the eloquence of a silent clown, sad and sympathetic, and his slight drinker's flush heightens the effect. But there's too much physical eccentricity in him for a Pierrot—knuckles cracking like cannon-shot, the flickers and grimaces of expression he either cannot or has stopped caring to iron out—and I would hate to have missed the extraordinary things Petherbridge does with the clerk's voice, with its hollow top storey that sounds always a little faded and acquiescent, a tone poem of down-at-heel, and yet can focus reedily into statements of amazing passive-aggression, usually directed at Ralph Nickleby. ("I shouldn't be surprised if my brother were dead."—"No, I don't think you would be.") Sometimes he observes common courtesy, and often he leaves the room with someone else's glass of punch. It is difficult to get more than two complete consecutive sentences out of him at the best of times. Occasionally he gives vent to a curiously articulated laugh, which I cannot help associating with Gormenghast's Doctor Prunesquallor. In short, he is a Dickensian grotesque in the not overly upholstered flesh, as gesturing and attenuated as anything by Phiz: and he is also a person, just as indelibly and all the more impressive.
And Roger Rees deserves real credit for not being boring in the middle of a cast of characters like that.4 This is where my brain gives out; all I can say is that if you have any interest in Dickens, in astonishing dramaturgy, or just in beautiful acting, Nicholas Nickleby is your play. Thank God for the BBC actually learning to keep tapes of the things they broadcast. I may have a new favorite film to add to the list.
1. While some of their descriptions may overlap, I love that Newman Noggs is not a first draft of Sydney Carton, or even typologically equivalent: Carton is genuinely self-destructive—he just happens to turn his suicide into someone else's saving grace—but neither has he hit bottom in the way that Noggs all too obviously has. With his wry martyr's bent, Stryver's learned friend retains a certain self-undercut glamour. There is no romance in Newman Noggs' garret, in his one rusty jacket and his stare or shamefaced constraint. His employment by Ralph Nickleby is particularly cruel, since one imagines their business dealings date from the point where Newman's resources and reputation were already starting to slip. It is therefore all the more satisfying that this "miserable and drunken hack" should be a chief engineer of Ralph's undoing: his final confrontation of his employer—in a rant that has clearly been years in the building—is an eleven o'clock showstopper.
2. He commits exactly one act of physical intervention in the play, and I noticed that it occasioned almost as much applause from the audience as Nicholas' two-fisted defense of Smike: as Squeers attempts to flee the lodging-house where he has cornered Peg Sliderskew and in turn the police have cornered him, Newman brings the brutal schoolmaster down with a smartly aimed tea-tray to the head. It seems to make him feel ("Hey! Not so much of a lunatic!") much better.
3. I will entertain arguments for David Threlfall's Smike, but I think that even if the actors are using their bodies in similar ways, they do so to different ends. Smike's physicality is primarily in representation of his body, starved and bent and spastic: the effects of cerebral palsy compounded by years of neglect and abuse. With Newman Noggs, although it is important that he limps slightly and that his hands are almost never still, what is more important are the emotions and thought processes their movements communicate: how he shapes with them, or effaces, the words he speaks. What we learn from watching him is not what he looks like, but who he is.
4. It helps that Rees is not typically handsome. He has a striking face, but it's a densely boned, slightly dished one; what I imagine nineteenth-century authors meant by "strongly marked." Especially with his very pale skin and his very black hair, he could also have been an original illustration. It helps more that he can act. For eight and a half hours straight. I still can't figure out why I haven't seen him in more leading roles!
nineweaving asked me to post about one of the characters I have been bending her ear about, so here he is. I had several reasons for wanting to see Nicholas Nickleby. One was the chance to see Roger Rees in a leading role; I had noticed him in a small part in The Prestige (2006), after which he kept turning up as a character actor and never onscreen for more than ten minutes unless you count the original cast recording of Flaherty and Ahrens' A Man of No Importance (2002), which one still can't watch. Another was the staging: eight and a half hours of forty actors making up over a hundred and thirty roles and seven hundred pages with changes of light and voice and the props you can plainly see on the walls or tables when not in use. And a third was the presence of Edward Petherbridge, who in the absence of an alt-historical Leslie Howard is the only actor I can picture as Lord Peter Wimsey; Greer had told me he was playing Newman Noggs, which meant nothing to me. "You would very much like him, I think. Quirky, melancholic, kind, and very shabby." All of the above turned out to be true. What she failed to tell me was that he was also completely awesome.
(I don't think I can satisfactorily summarize Nicholas Nickleby in two sentences. It's a novel by Charles Dickens, which means that if it's not A Christmas Carol or filmed by David Lean, there's no way to get it all in under two hours—Wikipedia doesn't even try. For the purposes of this entry, suffice it to say that Nicholas is our headstrong hero, Smike the defenseless drudge he rescues from a cold hell of a Yorkshire school, Ralph Nickleby his uncle whose ill-treatment of Nicholas' family drives the whole massive concatenation of plot, and Newman Noggs his beaten-down clerk, "a sallow-faced man in rusty brown." Be warned that I have not yet read the novel; all my referents are David Edgar and Trevor Nunn. But I have a copy, and I'll probably post about that, too, someday. To continue—)
For a drunken ex-gentleman with one of the world's most permanently woebegone expressions, Newman Noggs is surprisingly effective. It is in character that he should sympathize with Nicholas and Smike in their flight from Dotheboys Hall, but it does not automatically follow that he should then provide them with somewhere to stay, a paying situation (however short-lived), and other windfalls of much-needed practical as well as moral support; it is even less predictable that he should become the fragile, funny, resolute force for good he does in the play's last act. In most and too many respects, he's a pushover. He's never met a drink he won't finish; he'll go behind Ralph Nickleby's back, but he's never crossed the moneylender outright; he can't even evict the neighbor who cozies himself right up at the expense of Newman's coal. He's full of half-finished gestures, sentences that trail off or stop themselves short: he cancels them before someone else can. (Half of what he says is in his hands, anyway: waving things off, holding them in.) He's good at simply not doing things, but very bad at saying no. And yet he's gentler and more true than almost anyone else onstage, in his stop-and-start, regretful way. It's almost miraculous. What we are allowed to glimpse of his interior life is heartbreaking, as in the letter he slips Nicholas: "Forgive errors: I have forgotten all my old ways. My spelling may have gone with them . . . I was a gentleman then. I was indeed."1 He is not a dreamer, for all his distraction—indeed, he's probably more of a realist than his master, who seems to preserve the illusion that money is the solution to all secrets. "I know the world," Ralph boasts, "and the world knows me." Newman says only, poignantly, "I know the world." But somehow there's no cynicism in his wreck; his present reduced circumstances make him all the more protective of others. And therefore a very suitable genius for Nicholas, a still flickering complement to the boy's bare-knuckle fire: "Damn it, I'm proud of you—I'd have done the same myself!"2
But I repeat that almost, because a miracle would be insufferable and Newman Noggs is no plaster saint. He may be3 the most physically constructed part in the play—Petherbridge must have trained as a dancer or a mime, because he is recognizable in a crowd by his body language alone. There is an entire character in the way he carries himself, half apologetic and half careless, like a halting heron, with his past always around his shoulders like the shawl he wraps in because he cannot afford a topcoat anymore. Small gestures, like the exasperated snap-shut of a ledger or the conversation-closing replacement of his hat on his head, delineate his temper more precisely than his staccato remarks. It is no surprise that his performance includes bits of actual mime, some of which are in service of the mise-en-scène (as when we watch him squeeze down the narrow corridor between his office and his master's, which is of course plain air; stampeded by impatient clients, he is shoved up against the fourth wall) and others of Newman Noggs' feelings (as when he enacts an imaginary thrashing of his employer or daydreams of force-feeding him one of every coin of the realm). He has the eloquence of a silent clown, sad and sympathetic, and his slight drinker's flush heightens the effect. But there's too much physical eccentricity in him for a Pierrot—knuckles cracking like cannon-shot, the flickers and grimaces of expression he either cannot or has stopped caring to iron out—and I would hate to have missed the extraordinary things Petherbridge does with the clerk's voice, with its hollow top storey that sounds always a little faded and acquiescent, a tone poem of down-at-heel, and yet can focus reedily into statements of amazing passive-aggression, usually directed at Ralph Nickleby. ("I shouldn't be surprised if my brother were dead."—"No, I don't think you would be.") Sometimes he observes common courtesy, and often he leaves the room with someone else's glass of punch. It is difficult to get more than two complete consecutive sentences out of him at the best of times. Occasionally he gives vent to a curiously articulated laugh, which I cannot help associating with Gormenghast's Doctor Prunesquallor. In short, he is a Dickensian grotesque in the not overly upholstered flesh, as gesturing and attenuated as anything by Phiz: and he is also a person, just as indelibly and all the more impressive.
And Roger Rees deserves real credit for not being boring in the middle of a cast of characters like that.4 This is where my brain gives out; all I can say is that if you have any interest in Dickens, in astonishing dramaturgy, or just in beautiful acting, Nicholas Nickleby is your play. Thank God for the BBC actually learning to keep tapes of the things they broadcast. I may have a new favorite film to add to the list.
1. While some of their descriptions may overlap, I love that Newman Noggs is not a first draft of Sydney Carton, or even typologically equivalent: Carton is genuinely self-destructive—he just happens to turn his suicide into someone else's saving grace—but neither has he hit bottom in the way that Noggs all too obviously has. With his wry martyr's bent, Stryver's learned friend retains a certain self-undercut glamour. There is no romance in Newman Noggs' garret, in his one rusty jacket and his stare or shamefaced constraint. His employment by Ralph Nickleby is particularly cruel, since one imagines their business dealings date from the point where Newman's resources and reputation were already starting to slip. It is therefore all the more satisfying that this "miserable and drunken hack" should be a chief engineer of Ralph's undoing: his final confrontation of his employer—in a rant that has clearly been years in the building—is an eleven o'clock showstopper.
2. He commits exactly one act of physical intervention in the play, and I noticed that it occasioned almost as much applause from the audience as Nicholas' two-fisted defense of Smike: as Squeers attempts to flee the lodging-house where he has cornered Peg Sliderskew and in turn the police have cornered him, Newman brings the brutal schoolmaster down with a smartly aimed tea-tray to the head. It seems to make him feel ("Hey! Not so much of a lunatic!") much better.
3. I will entertain arguments for David Threlfall's Smike, but I think that even if the actors are using their bodies in similar ways, they do so to different ends. Smike's physicality is primarily in representation of his body, starved and bent and spastic: the effects of cerebral palsy compounded by years of neglect and abuse. With Newman Noggs, although it is important that he limps slightly and that his hands are almost never still, what is more important are the emotions and thought processes their movements communicate: how he shapes with them, or effaces, the words he speaks. What we learn from watching him is not what he looks like, but who he is.
4. It helps that Rees is not typically handsome. He has a striking face, but it's a densely boned, slightly dished one; what I imagine nineteenth-century authors meant by "strongly marked." Especially with his very pale skin and his very black hair, he could also have been an original illustration. It helps more that he can act. For eight and a half hours straight. I still can't figure out why I haven't seen him in more leading roles!