Review: Andersen's English, Hampstead Theatre

Written for Time Out

As new writing goes, Andersen’s English is the sort of quaint relic commonly assumed to be extinct outside of Richmond, where audiences apparently delight in ponderous, fusty dramas grown sepia-tinted with nostalgia. Taken on its own terms, however, there is a quiet Donnish intelligence to Sebastian Barry’s portrait of Charles Dickens as a household dictator authoring the lives of his family as if characters in a novel.

The celebrated Danish author Hans Christian Andersen visits Dickens’s Kent home, oblivious at first to the domestic turmoil therein. As Dickens grows increasingly tyrannical, banishing his wife Catherine (Niamh Cusack) and sending his son to war, Andersen naively outstays his welcome.

So fascinated is Barry by his own subject matter that he neglects our interests, heeding thoroughness at the expense of a good yarn. Writing more with a historian's than a journalist's sensibility, Barry feels the need to cover every angle, refolding his story to ensure that we see every possible character combination and cramming in biographical idiosyncrasies wherever possible.

Max Stafford-Clark’s production does little to enliven Barry’s text, bar matching the breathless claustrophobia chez Dickens with Lucy Osbourne’s cramped, furniture-heavy design. David Rintoul gives Dickens sufficient pomp and self-import and Danny Sapani’s sing-song broken English mines some humour, but there’s little by way of universality or urgency in this thesis of a play.