Bleak House

It Queen Victoria were in the Royal box while Emlyn William reads Dickens, the scene would be complete. For costumed as Dickens in nineteenth century evening clothes and a massive beard, Williams recreates a dignified and genteel era. His copy of Block House is on the red velvet reading stand only for the sake of appearance, since Williams recites unfalteringly his adaptation of the bulky novel. Rearranging and shortening the stands of the initiate plot. Williams presents a version of Bleak House which the listener can follow with case and pleasure.

The world of Tulkinghorn, Snagsby, and Turveydrop is a somewhat exclusive one, but to those who have not yet been able to penetrate Dickens' wordy, comic society Williams offers extensive introductions. His thirty-five characters are each sharply etched, sometimes by a gesture of the performer, sometimes by a line from the author. As Mrs. Pardiggle, an officious do-gooder, Williams seems to puff out, his voice crispens, his eye arrests. And Dickens delineates shrewish Mrs. Snagsby with "she has a nose like a sharp autumn-evening, inclining to be frosty at the end."

Bleak House is Dickens' crusade against the British Court of Chancery which often dragged its lawsuits throughout several generations. Modeled on an actual twenty-year case, his suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is so old it has become "the death of many, but a joke in the legal profession." Caught in this slow judicial mill is a dewy orphan, Esther Summerson, and a bushelful of broadly caricatured eccentrics. Dickens loses his lightly ironic tone only when he drenches little Jo, the street sweeper, in compassion. Even here Williams is superb; he thunders the author's tearful commentary with a gusto as energetic as the Victorian's prose.

At the curtain call, Williams bows deeply to the book before him. But though the words he reads are Dickens', it is also Williams' skill as an editor and actor which makes Bleak House an unusual and fascinating performance.