AN EVENING OF DELIGHT

Brave man that he is Lloyd Lee asked me to write a review of his show 'Educating Charlie,' so I have.


AN EVENING OF DELIGHT

It is impossible to use too many superlatives in describing Lloyd’s Lee’s one-man show based on the entertainments that Charles Dickens himself used to give. But ‘Educating Charlie’ is much more than a series of readings - it is a full-hearted theatrical event, both excellently written and magnificently performed.

In the show we trace the story of Dickens' life from his humble Portsmouth beginnings, through his happy youth in Chatham and then to the great London wen, following in the footsteps of his father’s distress. We feel for him as he is put to work, aged 12, as a humble toiler in a boot blacking factory by the Thames. As he tells this tale of the ups and downs of a young life, he describes the real adults who peopled it and shows us how he used them as models for the characters in his novels whom we know and have come to love - Pickwick, Mr Jingle, Wackford Squeers, The Micawbers, Sam Weller, Fagin and so on.

Lloyd manages to bring real Victorian authenticity to this eclectic family. He commands a range of accents and voices that is at once as at home in portraying the squeaking high Cockney treble of an agonised Mrs Micawber as it is the low Yiddish bass of Fagin. And as with the voice, Lloyd’s action and gestures convince us that we are in the actual presence of these souls so that we, the audience, experience the same astonishment and bewilderment that Dickens himself must have done as a boy in his encounters with the poets and schoolteachers, cabmen and boot boys he found in his new London world.

Truly, this is a mighty show and as good an evening’s transport of delight as ever one might hope to encounter on the London, or any other stage.

Peter Sain ley Berry
EuropaWorld
15/3/08