This post is contributed by Deborah Siddoway, a PhD candidate at Durham University and a novelist, whose debut novel Dark Waters, is published on 12 September 2024 by Bloodhound Books.

This review is based on my visit to the National Theatre for the evening performance of London Tide on 11 April 2024. London Tide ran at the National Theatre until 22 June 2024. It was an eerie and fascinating production, with some stand out performances by Jake Wood as a creepy Gaffer Hexam and Ellie-May Sheridan as a spirited and defiant Jenny Wren, but I left the theatre with very mixed thoughts. The play managed to capture the spirit of the Thames, a river that I am obsessed with and which features in my forthcoming novel. But was London Tide a good adaptation of Our Mutual Friend? These are my reflections:

Walking along Southbank from Waterloo tube station, with the Thames to my left as I made my way to the National Theatre to see London Tide, Ben Power’s new adaptation of Dickens’s last completed novel, all I could think was what a challenge it would be to condense a novel as rich, complex, and dense as Our Mutual Friend for the stage.

Looking at the sheer size of the novel, a stage adaptation represents an ambitious undertaking. Yet Power manages to shrink and compact the narrative to fit within the confines of a just over three hour long theatrical performance. In doing so, however, the play loses much of what was intrinsic to Our Mutual Friend. Many of the characters are absent, and the spider web of plots that are threaded throughout the novel is thinned. Our Mutual Friend is complex, with an underlying exploration of shame and guilt and repeated revelations of deception and fraud within relationships. Perhaps it was always going to be impossible to reflect the novel’s layered multiplicities of meaning on the stage.

Our Mutual Friend is populated by characters who, as Daniel B. Stuart comments, “ensnare and entrap others”, and Dickens spent much of the narrative of his novel testing the relationship between love and money (Stuart 441). The tension inherent in this dichotomy is where London Tide begins, with the cast emerging from the depths of the Thames to sing: “This is a story about money and of love” (Power 3).

As the cast continued to explain to the audience what the story was about, including “a city”, “lies that are told”, “truths that are hidden”, and “death and resurrection”, the stage was filled with atmospheric fog rolling across the floor. The stage lights, mounted on rigging that filled the width and breadth of the stage, moved with fluidity suggestive of the flow of the tidal waters of the Thames. This was, perhaps, one of the most memorable aspects of the performance. For sitting at the heart of this conception of the novel is the Thames, the river running through the centre of London. The river becomes a dominant force within the play, particularly through the many references to the motion of it, the secrets it hides, and the filth it harbours. The Thames, as the lifeblood of the city becomes a central character in the play.

The main action begins on the river, clever use being made of the minimalist setting and props, with the actors, through the use of wooden planks, depicting Gaffer Hexam’s (Jake Wood) grisly trade of rowing along the Thames to fish out corpses. It is here that they find a body, later presumed to be that of John Harmon (Tom Mothersdale), who will spend much of the play hiding his true identity by adopting the name John Rokesmith in order to probe the moral worthiness of the bride his father had intended for him.

Power, recognising from the outset that it would be necessary to cull many of the stories from Our Mutual Friend, described the process of adaptation in the London Tide National Theatre Official Programme as being like archaeology, “[d]usting off the thing, trying to see its essence.”  Yet, even accounting for the need to trim the novel down to fit the stage, there are far too many changes made to the underlying story, which suggests that rather than trying to find the essence of Dickens’s work, Power was more concerned with telling the story in his own way.

Gone are the Lammles, the Podsnaps, Silas Wegg and Mr Venus. Gone, too, are the Twemlows and the Veneerings and many other minor characters that add much to the plot. Instead, the focus of the play is split between the fates of Bella Wilfer (Bella Maclean), a woman made a widow without ever having been a wife, and Lizzie Hexam (Ami Tredrea), who straddles the boundaries of respectability as she tries to better herself and her brother through education. While the play does explore the Dickensian concern over marriage as an economic enterprise through their respective relationships, it is courtship and romance that are prioritised on the stage.   

Besides the pared focus and much-reduced character cast, the play also suffered from a diminished or altered characterisation of well-known or beloved characters such as Noddy Boffin (Peter Wight), Jenny Wren (Ellie-May Sheridan), and Eugene Wrayburn (Jamael Westman). Where this adaptation really faltered, however, was through a persistent failure to reflect the intricacies of the various relationships depicted in the novel. The relationship between Bella and her father, as portrayed on the stage, was particularly jarring when set against what Dickens had written. The doting daughter was largely absent, and the warmth Dickens had infused into their relationship reduced to something tepid.  When the cumulative effect of all this is considered, what is left is nothing but the mere outlines of the Dickensian story, a trimmed down version of the novel.

While the agency of the women is much expanded in the play, it did come at the expense of the Dickensian imperative implicit in the narrative of the novel. One of the hardest things to reconcile was Power’s decision to have Rokesmith make the revelation that he was John Harmon prior to his wedding to Bella, allowing Bella to make the decision to be with him in the full knowledge that the man had been lying to her from the moment of meeting her. “I’m with you”, she says, even after she is made fully aware of the level of deceit that he is capable of. In my opinion, this undermined the intent underpinning Our Mutual Friend, which utilised the frauds contained within the novel as a means to “highlight the potential for the ethical or emotional abuses allowed by the patriarchal system of Victorian courtship and marriage” (Gates 237).

Worse is that when Charley Hexam (Brandon Grace) asks his sister to forgive him for wanting to marry her off to Bradley Headstone (Scott Karim) to secure his own financial future, Lizzie not only tells him that she forgives him but that she is proud of him. Proud of him for what? For wanting to deliver her up to a man who was little better than an obsessive stalker? A man who had already been rejected by Lizzie, and, as Sean Grass so eloquently puts it, spends much of the novel “weltering in blood”? (Grass 29). It represented a diminution of Lizzie as a character, the pride she feels in herself for her willingness to suffer for the man she loves (“I am proud and glad” she says twice in the book (528, Bk III, Ch IX)) displaced and given over to her brother. It is especially galling when it is remembered that in the novel, it is Charley who is proud of Lizzie, not the other way around: “‘My sister Lizzie,’ said the boy proudly, ‘wants no preparing, Mr. Headstone. What she is, she is, and shows herself to be. There’s no pretending about my sister’” (217, Bk II, Ch I).

It was a frustrating interpretation of her character. It is at this stage that an exasperated Jenny Wren interjects to wonder, “if we’ll ever be done with it […] the endless job of forgiving men,” her comment met with delighted applause from the audience, no doubt as exasperated as I was with the prioritisation of the happy marriage plot at the expense of the darkness of the male/female relationships that Dickens had explored within the book.

As the play ended, with “the grey light of dawn… | Creeping back to life,” I was left with the haunting sense that it hadn’t been enough (Power 147). While there was much to commend in terms of the staging and presentation of the story, as well as some brilliant individual performances, I could only dwell on what had been missing. It seems that even a three-hour performance is not sufficient to capture the profound and enduring brilliance of Dickens’s masterpiece.

Works Cited

London Tide National Theatre Official Programme.

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Edited by Michael Cotsell, OUP, 2008.

Gates, Sarah. ‘Pious Fraud and Secret Chamber: Our Mutual Friend and the Intertextual Marriage Plot.’ Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 46, Penn State University Press, 2015, pp. 231–52.

Grass, Sean. ‘Revising Codes: Education, Empathy and the Case for Bradley Headstone’ in Dickens Quarterly, Vol 37 (1), March 2020, pp. 29-46.

Power, Ben. (songs by PJ Harvey and Ben Power) London Tide. Faber, 2024.

Stuart, Daniel B. ‘“No shadow of another parting”: Unrequited Love, Stalking and Dickens’s Rejected Men’, in Dickens Quarterly, Vol 38 (4), December 2021, pp. 429-51.