As a commercial prospect, you can’t fault this stage refit of the Dickensian Radio 4 comedy Bleak Expectations. Hit shows cannibalised from the broadcast media (see another recent Watermill theatre hit, Spike) bring fans along with them. Celebrity guest stars – Stephen Fry inevitably among them – are promised. Dickens himself remains an audience favourite. You might even point to the current zeal for deconstructing the Victorian age and its accomplishments, and the racist and colonial assumptions that underpinned them.
Actually, let’s not point to that. About the era’s sexism and sexlessness, Bleak Expectations jokes relentlessly. About more topical controversies, it has little to say, leaving undisturbed the jollity that results when you satirise only those 1800s foibles we all already agree on. It does this with considerable vim, as the cast of characters familiar from the airwaves reassemble.
