Jack Maggs

Peter Carey’s novel Jack Maggs reimagines Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations through more modern sensibilities and the viewpoint of the ex-convict rather than the child.  Dickens’s fearsome Abel Magwitch has become Jack Maggs, and the child Pip has become Henry Phipps.  Samuel Adamson’s adaptation of the novel into a play cleverly frames it within an 1879 stage production that presents the “true story” of the events of 1837.  This allowed the framing play’s narrator intermittent engagement with the (1879) fictitious audience.  But it also made appropriate the use of many stagecraft techniques from the late nineteenth century — including old-fashioned set furniture’s doubling as doorways; curtains’ doubling as skies; and some cute use of silhouettes.  The person responsible for the brilliant set design, Ailsa Paterson, was responsible for the equally remarkable costumes, which contributed much to the entire production’s verisimilitude.

The State Theatre Company South Australia had a challenging script to work with.  It can’t be easy to adapt a thoughtful novel of interior life to a play, and Adamson’s adaptation, which also chooses to emphasise themes of homosexual and filial love rather more than the theme of Maggs’s desperation to reclaim his identity as an Englishman, understandably loses much of the novel’s thematic coherence.  The company nonetheless brought to the stage a masterpiece of flawlessly coordinated emotional realism through which the cast fully realised every character and we came to understand and empathise with the rough Jack Maggs, to feel anxious for the woman who comes to love him, and to despise his adoptive son.  Though the production is by no means a musical, the quirky musical numbers dotted throughout provided amusing interest, and the cast’s controlled enthusiasm offered the reassurance that this slightly manic play was proceeding just as it should.  I’m sure every audience member left smiling.

John P. Harvey

Image: [L–R] James Smith, as Tobias Oates, and Mark Saturno, as Jack Maggs, in Jack Maggs.  Photographer: John P. Harvey.