The Dickens of a Play

The holiday diet of Dickens on TV ended with two nights of The Mystery of Edwin Drood - his last unfinished novel. He intended it to be published in twelve monthly instalments but he got up one morning with toothache, became very ill and died having only completed six.

It was once performed as a musical with the audience, each night, given the choice of three endings.

Now dramatised by Gwyneth Hughes, it is a dark piece with lust, sexual jealousy, murder and racism fuelled by liberal doses of laudanum doled out by a motherly Julia Mckenzie.  John Jasper the drug addicted choir master is obsessed with his nephew’s fiancée – Rosa Bud.

“Your bud has been plucked!” is a line Jasper fiendishly shouts to his nephew. 

The nephew – Edwin Drood is played by Freddie Fox and Rosa Bud by Tamzin Merchant.  The two of them together look like perfect innocent children making the dastardly Jasper seem like Lucifer himself.

Freddie Fox is the son of the brilliant actors Edward Fox (Day of the Jackal) and  Joanna David.  His sister is Emilia Fox, his uncle - James Fox (The Servant) and his cousin is Laurence Fox, co- star of Lewis – another British acting dynasty.

Jasper is played with chilling menace by Matthew Rhys and if he wasn’t the gay brother in the American TV show Brother’s and Sisters I’m a Dutchman.

At first with Jasper throttling his nephew, the story seems clear but nothing is as it seems and one is gripped to the end to discover who did what.  Certainly Edward disappears and the finger points to Jasper.

 The manuscript is in the Victoria and Albert Museum written at a frantic pace with crossings out and corrections – right up to the time he died and it isn’t clear if even Dickens knew how it was going to end.  His last written word was ‘appetite.’

Dickens makes even the smallest characters interesting and the actors do him proud; Rory Kinnear (yes he is the son of that late, great character actor Roy Kinnear who tragically died falling from a horse in the film Return of the Musketeers) plays the Reverend Crisparkle who seems to be developing an attachment to Edwin’s illegitimate sister.  Alun Armstrong plays the kindly lawyer whose clerk was a joy to watch, played – I think - by Alfie Davis.

I love the way Dickens clearly portrays the difference between good and evil and it was great to end a Dickens fest on an unfamiliar play that kept one guessing to the end.  The cathedral crypt, the graveyard, the music and the tantalising snippets of Matthew Rhys’ glorious voice letting rip makes me want to watch it again.

The photograph depicts Matthew Rhys as John Jasper, Tamsin Merchant as Rosa Bud and Freddie Fox as Edwin Drood in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  BBC2