Guest Blog: 'We Wanted It To Be Reverential But Playful': Co-Adapter and Director Abigail Pickard Price on DAVID COPPERFIELD At Jermyn Street Theatre

Dickens draws the most remarkable characters, there are few writers with whom we remember their characters above all else, but I think he is one of them. From Fagin to the Artful Dodger, Marley to Scrooge, Wilkins Micawber to Uriah Heep, he has created some of the most famous characters in literary history. What a privilege it has been to bring some of these characters to life on stage in David Copperfield.

Having adapted Pride and Prejudice for the stage in 2024, Sarah Gobran, Matt Pinches and I, explored a number of classic texts for a new venture. The vividness of David’s world, as painted by Dickens, immediately sucked us in. The text spans decades of David’s life, from birth onwards. Written retrospectively in the first person, the book can - on occasion - be reflective but, more often than not we are powering through the life of this young man at a brilliant pace, meeting a wealth of people along the way. We are invited to see the world through a child’s eyes, snapshots of memories that are not quite fully formed, characters that seem almost other worldly and yet strangely familiar.

David is a boy with a vivid imagination, and we get to benefit from this. In the book, after learning about his birth, David talks us through the first people he remembers, his household servant (and something of a surrogate mother) Peggotty, is said to have “cheeks and arms so hard and red that I wondered the birds didn’t peck her in preference to apples”, this description sets a precedent for the arrival of every new character.

As we delve further into the book we meet the infamous Uriah Heep “I observed that his nostrils, which were thin and pointed, with sharp dints in them, had a singular and most uncomfortable way of expanding and contracting themselves—that they seemed to twinkle instead of his eyes, which hardly ever twinkled at all”. These visceral descriptions and the fact they are told through a child’s perspective formed the basis for our adaptation. As David grows so do his characters, what a treat and a challenge to explore these characters over such a period of time and through both the lens of a child and an adult.

From the offset in this adaptation we wanted the piece to be reverential but playful, capturing the charm of Dickens book and reflecting the heart of it. The challenge of adapting this epic for only three actors served to help us in this matter, ensuring we always kept a lightness of touch. Dickens’s extraordinary character descriptions help us here, sometimes David talks us through them on stage but always they provide useful lynch pins for the actors to pull back to when moving at such apace through the multitude of characters they play.

I hope we have created a piece that invites the audience to use their imagination to build the full picture of David’s life, just as Dickens has with the book. A piece of theatre that employs many a theatrical device to create as colourful a world as Dickens has. And, always making sure an audience feels welcomed into the extraordinary world of some of Dickens's most famous characters.

Read our review of David Copperfield here.

David Copperfield is at Jermyn Street Theatre until 20 December