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Dickens unpluggedSixth-form nihilism?DICKENS UNPLUGGED This piece of burlesque, from the pen of Adam Long, founder member of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, is a stage show about to transfer to London’s West End, which takes us on a whimsical and musical journey through the works of Charles Dickens. The five-member cast is made up of very talented actors, musicians and singers and superficially this production could be taken as just jolly good fun. However, a big hit at the recent Edinburgh Festival, it actually seems to be much more subversive, and is essentially a postmodern tract. Why do I say that? For all his sentimentality, in his stories Dickens often dealt with the great questions of life and death, truth and lies, goodness and cruelty, disaster and redemption. If we can make such things the butt of jokes, what does that ultimately say about our present culture? No place for truthThe postmodern thrust is introduced near the beginning of the performance. The scene from Oliver Twist in which the horrendous Bill Sykes murders Nancy (often recited by Dickens in stage performance in his life-time), is first delivered with hilarity. The character of Dickens himself then intervenes. He protests and then performs the piece as he intended, with seriousness and pathos. As he finishes, there is a stunned silence as the rest of the cast feel the weight of the incident. They are deeply disturbed and touched to the heart. ‘What’s that?’ they ask Dickens. ‘That is truth’, the great author replies. ‘Well, we don’t want that kind of thing’, is the gist of the response. The audience erupts with laughter; and so we go full steam ahead into making fun of every one of Dickens’s novels: David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, and the rest. To laugh at murder, cruelty and even sacrificial love is to say that life is meaningless. It is a form of nihilism in the guise of a sixth-form review. David Wells, in his book Above All Earthly Pow’rs, warned that, as opposed to the old gloomy European nihilism of Sartre and Camus, a new nihilism of hilarity is rising in America. ‘Life is meaningless, so why not make fun of it?’ It is interesting that the cast of Dickens Unplugged come from the West Coast of the USA. Evidently, as Romans 1 and other biblical passages suggest, once we reject God it is not long before goodness and truth begin to go by the board. Tragedies to laugh atOne is left wondering, if cruelty and murder in the great novels of our culture can be lampooned and the audience love it, how long it will be before real-life atrocities like the holocaust or the present suffering and death in Darfur also become material for slapstick. We already have Mock the Week, so how long before the TV news itself is seen as part of the comedy schedules? Why not, if life is meaningless? John Benton© Evangelicals Now - April 2008 |