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David Edgar, Trevor Nunn and John Caird’s stage production with the Royal Shakespeare Company (1980-1, screened by Channel 4 in 1982). The second one is the longest adaptation ever of a Dickens novel, i. e. The first is the 1947 Ealing Studios production directed by Alberto Cavalcanti which was released during the British film revival of the post World War 2 period, together with the David Lean film adaptations of Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The four films I will address span fifty-five years.

(.)Ģ There were numerous stage productions of the novel in the 19th century as well as a dozen film versions of the novel from the two minute and a half adaptation of the Dotheboys Hall episode in 1903 to Jim Goddard’s shooting of David Edgar’s nine-hour long stage production in 1980.

3 I will use Roland Barthes’s structuralist terminology taken up by Brian McFarlane in Novel to Film.

2 The Chichester Festival Theatre chose to present it once again in the Summer of 2006.

We shall see how Dickens’s narrative, which is already quite theatrical on several counts, is turned into a filmic narrative and shall assess whether Bakhtinian literary dialogism on the one hand and double enunciation defining any stage production on the other are affected by the film form. What becomes of this theatrical section in film adaptations of the novel? What are the modifications operated by the film’s enunciation? Such are the questions which will be raised here.

1 But what is essential for this paper is the metatheatrical aspect that lies at the root of a whole section, during which Nicholas Nickleby and his protégé Smike meet a theatre company, the Crummles troupe of comedians. The alternation between Nicholas’s adventures and Kate’s plight is also Dickens’s tribute to the art of melodrama which he had already alluded to in Oliver Twist. The novel indeed proposes scenes that might suit the melodramatic stage: Hawk’s seduction of Kate Nickleby, the arranged marriage between Gride and Madeline, the Mantalinis’ sheer theatricality, Fanny Squeers’s attempt at seducing Nicholas and so on. Hybridity is the key word when one deals with this particular work. As is well known, he had an appointment with a stage manager in Covent Garden but caught a cold and never rescheduled it. The text reveals Dickens’s interest in the theatre, a career he once contemplated but quickly gave up. 1 The famous bacon metaphor: ‘It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to pre (.)ġ Among Dickens’s novels, Nicholas Nickleby is his most theatrical one.