United Kingdom Guildford Shakespeare Company’s David Copperfield: Holy Trinity Church, High Street, Guildford, Surrey, 9.2.2026. (BF)
At last! Guildford Shakespeare Company’s David Copperfield comes home. Now showing for a few weeks in Guildford in Surrey, between its London première, its transfers to Windsor and Ipswich and its imminent transfer to New York, where it will form part of the Brits Off Broadway Programme. For more information click here.
This is an exciting, amusing, in fact amazing, evening’s entertainment from the Guildford Shakespeare Company, with some delightful ensemble playing. Charles Dickens’s great, rich, complex semi-autobiographical novel with a huge cast of characters in multiple locations has been transformed into two-and-a half-hours (including interval) of theatre with just three actors on one small stage. The adaptation is by Abigail Pickard Price, who used just three actors in her very successful adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for Guildford Shakespeare Company in 2024.
The play is by turns funny, sad, frightening, serious and always absorbing. All three actors are brilliant: Eddy Payne plays David himself, providing an anchoring continuity, while Luke Barton and Louise Beresford play nine (9!) characters each, faultlessly coping with lightning changes of character and costume, differentiating each with expression, voice, accent, posture. You get so involved that you quickly forget how very clever it all is technically.
The clever costumes are by Neil Irish: particular props such as hats or sticks become associated with particular characters, which assists the quick changes. He also designed the sets, where four old-fashioned suitcases double as chairs, tables, rocks, desks, the sea is suggested by fabric rolled out from little Emily Peggotty’s skirt, and ships by little models held up one of the actors, upside down in the case of Mr Peggotty’s upturned barge. The lighting, by Mark Dymock, and the venue, the beautiful Holy Trinity Church, bring a gorgeous atmosphere to the production.
Naturally, the narrative of the original novel has been condensed, but according to my somewhat hazy memory of that original, the plot essentials have been retained. It is a bildungsroman, a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth and change of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood. So as in the novel we start with David’s birth – attended by the eccentric Aunt Betsy Trotwood (played by Louise Beresford) until she flounces out in anger that he is not a girl, and by the warm and loving Peggotty (played by Luke Barton) – and early childhood. He narrates as an adult but then acts or interacts with the other characters as a child, so that throughout the play we see him growing to maturity. There is the shocking arrival on the scene of young David’s abusive stepfather Mr Murdstone, harshly voiced by Barton but made even more terrifying by being represented by just a tall hat and long greatcoat held very high. And so to boarding school, where the headmaster is another of Barton’s hard-hearted frighteningly tall men, but David makes friends with the lively and mischievous Steerforth (Louise Beresford).
David’s mother dies and he is sent to work in Murdstone’s bottling factory, cruel labour for a child, but there he meets the feckless but good-natured Mr Micawber, giving Barton the opportunity to play a kinder and indeed comic character. Next, David runs away to Aunt Betsy’s in Canterbury where he meets the kindly but simple-minded Mr Dick (Barton again), warm and sympathetic Agnes Wickfield (Beresford), obsequiously ‘umble Uriah Heep (Beresford again) and later on, entrancingly pretty but impractical Dora Spenlow (Beresford yet again). And so on, at a cracking pace, through David’s marriage to Dora, Emily Peggotty’s seduction and abandonment by Steerforth, Mr Micawber’s insolvency and imprisonment, Dora’s death and David’s eventual re-marriage.
The major theme of the play, as the title suggests, concerns David Copperfield himself, his growth to maturity, his gradual understanding of the world around him and his acquiring agency in his own life. But many of Dickens’s other concerns covered in the story are social issues, such as child exploitation, which he felt very strongly about since his own experience as a child working in the harsh conditions of a boot-blacking factory; he shows sympathy for the ‘fallen woman’ Emily, similar to his treatment of Nancy in Oliver Twist and for the inequality of women in marriage, as David’s mother’s falls victim to the complete domination, or as we would say now, coercive control, imposed by her second husband; and he touches on the need for humane treatment of the insane, as Betsy Trotwood takes on the care of Mr Dick rather than have him suffer ill treatment at an asylum.
An additional charm of the evening’s entertainment is the lovely setting in a Georgian church, where half the seats have been placed round little tables, cabaret style. The ticket pricing is also charming: on a Monday, it is ‘pay what you can’, which the Guildford Shakespeare Company has been offering for every production since February 2023, usually on Mondays. This works by providing a suggested range of ticket prices from £6 to £35 for those booking online and even allowing someone turning up on the night to pay as little as 50p. The scheme has been successful as part of the Company’s outreach programme, enabling many people to engage with theatre who might not otherwise be able to and offering people who can afford to pay the recommended price or more, the chance to support others who cannot.
The Guildford Shakespeare Company was founded in 2006 by then actors, now actor-managers, Matt Pinches and Sarah Gobran. It has gone from strength to strength in the succeeding twenty years, with innumerable examples of creative and innovative staging, excellent acting and really enjoyable evenings (or matinees), the most ambitious recently being last summer’s Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare) twinned with Company of Rascals (Porter). The latter was a play commissioned to show what the characters in the Shakespeare play were doing while offstage – both plays were very funny, but the clever combination even funnier. This is a talented company with a tremendous creative team. Pop over to Guildford or catch the current show elsewhere.
Barbara Ford
Featured Image: David (Eddy Payne) exhibits the case against Uriah Heep © Steve Gregson
Cast:
Ham Peggotty, Mr Creakle, Mr Murdstone, Mr Dick, Mr Micawber, Mr Spenlow, Mr Wickfield, Mrs Steerforth – Luke Barton
Miss Betsey, Mother, Steerforth, Mrs Micawber, Emily, Uriah Heep, Dora, Mr Peggotty, Agnes – Louise Beresford
David Copperfield – Eddy Payne
Creatives:
Original novel – Charles Dickens
Adaptation – Abigail Pickard Price, with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches
Director – Abigail Pickard Price
Set and Costume designer – Neil Irish
Lighting designer – Mark Dymock
Sound designer– Matt Eaton
Movement director – Amy Lawrence
Fight director – Philip d’Orléans