Our Mutual Friend

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise,
a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, is floating on the Thames —
The long Thameswater, the dark heart of London, into which
all the filth and dirt of the city is poured.

BBC Radio 4: 3, 10, 17 November 2024

It is quite something to adapt Dickens. My version of Our Mutual Friend will be the third in a series of Dickens adaptations on BBC Radio 4 this autumn, after Hard Times and Little Dorrit. My friend Graham White has adapted Hard Times and when we met last year to chat about our approaches to the material he remarked ‘when the BBC allows you to adapt Dickens, it feels like you’ve been given your pilot’s licence’. He’s right; there’s such a long tradition of adapting Dickens’s novels into drama — right from the beginning, at a time before strong copyright protections, when stage adaptations of his novels were sometimes produced with invented endings before the novels had finished serialising. Dickens works tremendously as performed drama. There are classic movies, classic stage versions, classic TV Dickens (Andrew Davies’s 2005 Bleak House for the BBC is my favourite adaptation of anything, ever; it’s eight hours long and we watch it every year and never tire of it.).

This is, I guess, because there is a certain theatricality to Dickens. I want to be careful about saying that, because when people say this it usually implies a rather particular (and sometimes quite patronising) idea of what theatre is. So his ‘larger-than-life’ characters do lend themselves to a certain kind of theatre tradition, but it’s also worth saying that there are many characters in Our Mutual Friend who are very precisely life-size (Lizzie Hexam, for example) and there is a gritty realism flowing through the novel. And, it should not need saying, the theatre is not always larger than life. Similarly, some suggest that there’s a melodramatic quality to Dickens which suggests an affinity with the stage. First, this usually patronises melodrama and therefore the stage. Second, what this usually means is that Dickens has sentimental good characters and dark-hearted evil characters who come to grief. My experience of this novel is different: there are moments of great tenderness and sadness (the deaths of the adopted Jonny and of Betty Higden, for example) where decent people die movingly; there are stirring moments where characters come into their own and assert themselves (Lizzie does this, and similarly Bella Wilfer’s famous ‘I want to be so much more than a doll in a doll’s house’) But it seems to me that it is sheer cynicism to call this sentimental. When Betty Higden dies, she is a decent, kind, hard-working woman, driven to vagrancy by the rapacious rich and fear of the poor house; Dickens makes very clear what we would now call her mental health challenges and it is clear she is driven to her death by starvation, anxiety, poverty and fear. That is not sentimental, in the sense of being pure fantasised emotion, freed from context. Similarly, Bella Wilfer — though in many ways a comic character — is rather like another woman later in the century who wants to escape the doll’s house, Nora Helmer from Ibsen’s play, in that she goes on a complicated journey of self-discovery and self-assertion that is fully realised and fully developed.

Let’s be more specific. I think there are two core muscles that move these books into drama. The first is that Dickens very frequently writes in scenes focused on external action. His are not especially ruminative internal books; they are Wittgensteinian more than Cartesian. They place people in situations and watch them coping or not coping, figuring things out and making things change. And this action structures the whole scene. This is, I think, more typical of theatre than the novel. For example, there’s a tremendous scene where Mr and Mrs Lammle — in order to secure for themselves some financial advantage — have brought together Georgiana Podsnap and ‘Fascination’ Fledgeby for a kind of blind date. This could easily be a very internal scene about the two young people’s nervousness or their feelings for each other. Another writer might take us into their thoughts; the shape of the scene might be the ebb and flow of their hopes batting up against their self-consciousness or naivety. But Dickens does not make it internal in that way; in fact he almost makes the fact of it not being internal the comic action that structures the scene. The two young people are shy to the point of incoherence and Mr and Mrs Lammle have to swoop in to declare what each is really trying to say, ventriloquising quite falsely for their young person.

Second is the dialogue. In most of the adaptations that I’ve done, the dialogue has needed to be rewritten. Either this is because — as in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos — the dialogue is perfectly good on the page and was never intended to be spoken out loud by an actor; or — as in Dead Souls or the Zolas — the book is a translation so the dialogue isn’t the original anyway. In all of these cases, I’ve had to write almost entirely new dialogue. But Dickens is different. Dickens wanted to be an actor, wanted to be a playwright, and when he wrote his books would walk about this room speaking the dialogue before writing it down; after he’d written the books, he’d go on reading tours, declaiming the works. He knew what it means for words to sit in a performer’s mouth. And I’m sure anyone who has ever adapted Dickens knows this; this is dialogue that lifts off the page. I have never before been able to place dialogue exchanges from a novel unamended into my script, but Dickens’s own dialogue powers through a lot of this adaptation.

This is not to say, of course, that, as Andrew Davies once mischievously suggested, that doing this kind of adaptation is just ‘copying out the best bits’. In fact, the year-long process of making this adaptation was almost entirely structural.

Dickens wrote his novel in monthly instalments of, usually, three chapters, over a year and a half. I am telling his story in three instalments of an hour which will appear over a fortnight. The is itself very difference. The serialised version is a slow burn; you can let stories emerge and develop gently, you will presume that the reader has time to ponder on the characters and stories; he told his stories in much smaller units; he needed multiple cliffhangers; he had considerable space and time to go on byways and diversions. By contrast, I need to keep the story moving quickly; characters need to be introduced and developed economically; the stories need to knit together with energy and drive. This is neither to say that Dickens does not exhibit energy and drive nor that a dramatised version can’t have moments of gentleness and diversion. But the forms are different.

The biggest difference, of course, is between writing and performance. When I’ve mentioned doing this project, people often say some version of ‘how are you going to compress it into three hours?’ This is a wholly understandable thought (and a thought I had myself), given that the novel is around a third of a million words, and my adaptation will be around 30,000 words. On the face of it it looks like my task is to find a way of cutting about 91% of Dickens’s text. But this is mistaken because a radio adaptation is not just the words. The tone of an actor’s voice, the world created through sound, the role of music, but also the juxtaposition and flow of scenes, the shaping of action, and so on, all create much more than a word count reveals.

One of the most extraordinary aspects of the book is also its greater challenge for the adaptor: the breadth and depth of the landscape. He has very rich characters, and very poor; wise and foolish; exploiters and the exploited. We range across and beyond London, the stories all yoked together by the sinister and foul Thames. We see the class range of London in the 1860s, there are disabled characters, families, friends, enemies, colleagues, professionals and criminals. That panoramic vision is part of what excited me about the book and I wanted to respect it. But that makes it more difficult to do on radio for various reasons: one, I have only three hours and there are many stories to tell; two, it can be difficult for an audio-only audience to retain all these stories and to recognise voices quickly enough to know where we are; three, in a radio drama, you typically only have around six or seven actors.

For all these reasons, stories needed to be consolidated. Sometimes, I felt like I was breaking apart the numerous chains that shape the story, removing links, making new connections across the chains, to create a dramatic structure. I have tried to retain all the main storylines: Lizzie Hexam & Wrayburn, Bella Wilfer & Rokesmith, the Lammles & Georgiana Podsnap, Lightwood’s investigations, Silas and Boffin, Headstone & Riderhood, Fledgeby & Riah, Jenny Wren. the Veneerings, and Betty Higden. Some characters have had to go: I found I could tell Lizzie’s story without Charley. I was sad to have to do without Twemlow whose forlorn place in the Veneering circle is one of the funniest parts of the book. The Venus story has also disappeared, as has the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters and its proprietress Miss Abbey Potterson. But in each case, I found the story could be told without them.

But most important has been the way that the story is told. I have wanted to sharpen certain pivots in the story (for example Lizzie’s acceptance of the proposal); there is a very big revelation which Dickens gives us in the middle, feeling he could not keep the secret for 18 months. I’ve pushed it later, because I think the secret will stay hidden for two weeks. Despite what I’ve said about Dickens structuring episodes in theatrical scenes, there are some moments where I’ve taken his third-person description and made a scene out of it (the Lammles’ honeymoon that opens my episode 2 is a good example). There are a few things that, to be honest, I didn’t think I could make work: Mr Boffin’s deliberate subterfuge as revealed at the end seemed impossible to me; in a different way, Wrayburn’s interest in Lizzie I’ve tried to finesse a little to remove any hint of the predatory.

That said, it’s interesting how contemporary the book feels. Of course, when the BBC first announced the series talking about the ‘striking parallels’ between Dickens’s time and our own, predictably the Daily Mail denounced this as woke Dickens and proceeded to point out the differences between our time and his. But, alas for the Mail, Dickens does seem quite woke in places. This is a book that champions education and welfare, castigates snobbery, prudishness, and xenophobia; it is implacable in its denunciation of antisemitism; it features at least one character with a physical disability and another with mental health challenges and both are heroic in their way; it finds dignity in working people and mocks the middle class. It doesn’t just do those things of course and these are developed through character, story and situation with all the complexity that always brings to these things. This is not a book that beats you over the head with messages and slogans.

It has been a joy to work on and the cast we had reflect beautifully and joyfully and heartbreakingly the panoramic vision of the novel. We have a cast that looks as much like modern London as Dickens’s characters looked like his London. It is directed, as ever, by Polly Thomas. I hope you like it.