Theater Review: ‘David Copperfield,’ at 59E59 Theaters, NYC

Contemporary readers recognize Charles Dickens as a novelist of astonishing productivity, but Victorians also knew him as an enthusiastic theater amateur—writing and directing his own productions among friends, and acting the roles of his major characters in hugely profitable author readings.

He would surely have been delighted in the dramatic possibilities realized of the most autobiographical of his fictions, David Copperfield, in this Guildford Shakespeare Company import for the current “Brits Off Broadway” series.

Abigail Pickard Price, who directed the show and wrote it with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches, has magically compressed the novelist’s sprawling doorstopper into two hours and 15 minutes of nonstop action in 59E59 Theaters’ Upper East Side venue, sidelining subsidiary figures to focus on Copperfield’s growth from fatherless child to husband and famous writer.

Even so, 19 characters appear onstage, brought to life by a talented trio of actors who won Best Ensemble Performance Award at the London Fringe Theatre Awards 25/26. Eddy Payne ably anchors the show as David, skillfully evoking his boy-to-man transition.

Even more extraordinary are Luke Barton and Louise Beresford, handle nine roles each, including both sexes. The transformations are always startling and sometimes hilarious.

As David’s devoted childhood nurse Peggotty, the rangy, long-faced Barton suggests John Lithgow in drag from The World According to Garp, and he’s not afraid to burlesque Mr. Micawber’s melodramatic denunciation of Uriah Heep.

Beresford, having proven her comic skills in Britain in plays like Noises Off and Bedroom Farce, wrings every laugh possible here as Miss Betsey Trottwood and David’s annoyingly childlike first wife Dora.

The actors accomplish this feat of invention and endurance through a whirlwind of quick-change costumes, puppets, and accents, supported by set/costume designer Neil Irish and movement/associate director Amy Lawrence. Props do double duty, including:

*a set of trunks morph into a stagecoach and a portable bar;
* a tall hat and long coat on a coatrack represent the unbending Murdstone;
*a baby blanket unwraps in a later scene to become David’s jacket;
*Emily’s dress unfurls to suggest the sea just off the coast of Great Yarmouth.

At the matinee I attended, another theatergoer told me she wanted to see this clever show because she had caught the Guildford troupe’s similarly delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice last year. Now, with this affectionate adaptation of Dickens (running through June 28), this immensely talented British theater company has built an eager audience for its next stateside visit.

Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Flattery, the One Industry Unaffected by Technology)

“The flattery industry remains old-fashioned, its work not yet disintermediated by tech. The wealthiest people can afford to surround themselves with actual bodies, who supply live flattery. Brooke Harrington writes in Capital without Borders, her study of wealth managers and their relationships with the super-rich, that some practitioners even attend their clients’ deathbeds. In flattery jobs, people skills usually trump technical competence.”— “World View” columnist Simon Kuper, “How Flattery Became a Big, Beautiful Industry,” The Financial Times, Nov. 29-30, 2025

For years, the dubious honor of being the most outrageous sycophant belonged to villainous Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, played by Roland Young (right, with Frank Lawton as the adult title character in the 1935 film adaptation) in the attached image.

But Simon Kuper is right to focus on actual, more current examples. I had always thought, from reading Cary Reich’s marvelous 1996 biography of Nelson Rockefeller, that, in his early rise as a midlevel Washington bureaucrat, the future New York governor had perfected the art of governmental brown-nosing.

Then I found out that Rocky had his own Mini-Me, albeit with a Teutonic accent, in foreign-policy adviser Henry Kissinger, who then turned around and performed the same function for Richard Nixon.

But the true horror, as Kuper notes, lies in the current group of advisers now surrounding Donald Trump. Their sole qualification for high office is not competence but absolute shamelessness in stroking their boss’s tender ego.

More than ever this week, Trump needs his own personal Uriah Heeps in the wake of public appearances on Greenland that were so unfocused, rambling and dangerous that they sparked renewed, urgent calls for invoking the 25^th Amendment to stop his insanity.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on ‘Real Love and Truth’)

“I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), David Copperfield (1850)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, Showing Why Students Hate Math Word Problems)

“Even when the lessons are done, the worst is yet to happen, in the shape of an appalling sum. This is invented for me, and delivered to me orally by Mr. Murdstone, and begins, ‘If I go into a cheesemonger’s shop, and buy five thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each, present payment’ — at which I see Miss Murdstone secretly overjoyed. I pore over these cheeses without any result or enlightenment until dinner-time, when…I have a slice of bread to help me out with the cheeses, and am considered in disgrace for the rest of the evening.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1850), David Copperfield (1850)

It's been nearly 50 years since I read David Copperfield, and with this novel so teeming with incidents and characters—and similarly lengthy Charles Dickens works I have read since—this particular episode involving the title hero, his wicked stepfather, and the latter’s only-slightly-less villainous sister had long since receded well back into my memory.

Then, about two weekends ago, as if in answer to one of my viewing prayers, TCM ran the wonderful 1935 adaptation of Dickens’ semi-autobiographical classic, produced by David O. Selznick and directed by George Cukor. It’s a model not just of terrific casting (W.C. Fields, most prominently, as Wilkins Micawber), but of editing a sprawling novel down to its essentials in just two hours of running time.

This scene stood out for me. David’s humiliation and fear on the page are not only captured but heightened on the screen, with fast cuts among David, his anxious mother, her goading sister-in-law, the smooth suitor turned household tyrant, and the whip that the latter carries and shortly uses on his stepson.

In addition, there’s a short addition of dialogue that I think would have further pained audiences that first saw this in movie theaters.

Right after Murdstone (played by Basil Rathbone, captured here in despicable perfection with Freddie Bartholomew as David and Elizabeth Allan as Mrs. Copperfield) mentions a “halfpenny each,” he continues, “And if I sell half of them at six pence-halfpenny, twenty at five pence, and use the rest myself, do I make a profit or loss?"

“Profit or less” would have been uppermost on the minds of Depression-era youthful moviegoers. Imagine them trying to quickly do this sum in their heads, floundering, and wondering how their inadequacy with this math might have contributed to their own failure to barely stay solvent.

Even now, the scene has a kind of horror for kids today, I think—not so much for the beating David endures at the hands of Murdstone (so sadistic that an unnerved Rathbone required several takes to get it right), but for what leads to it. The question is all too close to those word problems not only in algebra tests but also in standardized math tests taken by high school students of the postwar era.

Those of us who don’t recall those word problems with a shudder chuckle at jokes we’ll occasionally come across about them. (For instance, from Charlie Brown’s sister Sally in “Peanuts”: “Only in math problems can you buy 60 cantaloupes and no one asks what the hell is wrong with you.”)

“I have in my heart of hearts," wrote Dickens of the novel closest to him, "a favorite child and his name is David Copperfield." Let nobody forget that math was among the multiple traumas endured by this beleaguered orphan—and by no means the least.

(For more about Dickens’ pungent feelings and writings about math and education in general, try Brittany Carlson’s November 2020 blogpost for the Dickens Society.)

Flashback, November 1850: Dickens’ ‘Favourite Child,’ ‘David Copperfield,’ Published

With the last of its breathlessly awaited 20 monthly serial installments issued, David Copperfield was released in book form in November 1850, capping the publication journey of the most autobiographical novel by Charles Dickens. 

Just a few years before his death, the astonishingly prolific writer pronounced this his “favourite child” among his novels, and whenever writers use the adjective “Dickensian,” they, more likely than not, have in mind the miserable childhood remembered and subtly reworked here.

In some ways, the novelist didn’t realize just how autobiographical his fiction in this case was: He later wrote friend and future biographer John Forster that he hadn’t noticed that David’s initials were his own in reverse.

Even the title character’s first name has underdog overtones that Dickens would have identified with: Just as the biblical David had to overcome a direct threat to his life, so did Copperfield and Dickens, in the form of grinding poverty.

The story of a youth at bay, struggling with a broken home, adult cruelty, youthful infatuation and the meaning of true friendship surely shows up, in one form or another, in many reading lists for children and youth adults. But I wonder how much the great prototype of the coming-of-age tale—Dickens’ novel—is read today, either by youngsters at their leisure or by students?

When I eye its bulk (882 pages, minus the scholarly appendices, in the paperback I’m holding now), a quote from a considerably slimmer, more recent novel, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, inevitably springs to mind:  “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” 

And there goes, I suspect, any inclination to urge Dickens on younger readers.

Victorian readers had no such compunctions about the novel’s length or its sentimental, sometimes lachrymose, subject matter. David Copperfield did not initially sell as well as its predecessor, Dombey and Son, but it became Dickens’ best-known book, particularly admired by Leo Tolstoy and Somerset Maugham.

Part of the book’s appeal comes from its almost cinematic qualities. Dickens’ affection for the stage has been well-chronicled, but it is equally extraordinary how he anticipated the elements of the motion picture: realistic depiction of setting and atmosphere, memorable dialogue, and most of all, montage, or parallel action that drives narrative simultaneously among different characters (a technique, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein noted in a famous essay, first employed by D.W. Griffith).

The 2020 film, starring Dev Patel in the title role, is only the latest adaptation of the novel for the big screen and television. The many extraordinary characters that Dickens created (Micawber, Mr. Murdstone, Uriah Heep, Steerforth, Betsey Trottwood) has attracted, over the past 85 years (since the classic MGM version), some of the brightest acting talents, including Basil Rathbone, Maggie Smith, Ralph Richardson, Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier, Cyril Cusack, Wendy Hiller, Edith Evans, Michael and Corin Redgrave, Ron Moody, Bob Hoskins, Lionel Barrymore, Edna May Oliver, Hugh Laurie—and, in the most unconventional bit of casting, W.C. Fields as Micawber.

(As I contemplate all these actors--and all the other actors, directors, and adaptations of Dickens--it occurred to me that I could create an entire blog on everyone associated with these versions for film, TV and stage, and never come close remotely close to running out of material.)

But as much as anything else, what contemporary readers responded to in the novel was not just its masterly characterization or its vivid description—both characteristic of Dickens’ fiction from the start—but a more naked honesty than Dickens had previously attempted, or, as G.K. Chesterton termed it, “a new torrent of truth, the truth out of his own life.”

To some extent, that derived from its form: not merely a story seen through the consciousness of a child (something Dickens had created 12 years before in Oliver Twist), but an entire coming-of-age novel told through a first-person narrator.

Forster seems to have suggested this device after reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. But Dickens’ technique and voice differed from Bronte’s: less inclined at the start of the novel to take the reader immediately into the action, but more oriented towards a bifurcated vision of the past. Copperfield is not merely re-telling his history, but interpreting, even re-interpreting it as an adult, while foreshadowing later elements in his tale (e.g., the seaside setting and the roles of debt and dispersion, suggested in the sale of his birth caul).

In particular, Dickens--37 years old as he began his narrative, recalling a life of tumult and triumph--mined and tweaked his experiences and the people who played major roles in his life. 

For instance, Maria Beadnell, a pretty woman who infatuated him before she rejected his courtship attempts, was turned into David’s doll-like, childish first wife, Dora. Traits of the novelist’s father, John Dickens, were assigned to David’s stepfather, Mr. Murdstone (callousness), and Wilkins Micawber (an inveterate and unwise optimism in the face of financial catastrophe that has spawned the “Micawber Principle” of money management).

In a sense, the novel functioned as a form of displacement for Dickens’ long-repressed humiliation and anger at his parents, whose impracticality and improvidence led him to working in a blacking factory rather than being placed in school. Except for a reduction in age by two years (thus accentuating the peril faced by fictional David), the facts and feelings in this passage exactly mirror those of Charles:

“It is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.”

To be sure, the novel has its weaknesses: Chesterton complained that, in sending Emily, Peggotty and Micawber off to Australia in the conclusion, Dickens had conceived of the far-off colony as “a sort of island Valley of Avalon, where the soul may heal it of its grievous wound,” and I find Dora infuriatingly infantile at maddening length.

But altogether, Dickens’ recent biographer Claire Tomalin is correct in calling David Copperfield “a masterpiece built on Dickens's ability to dig into his own experience, transform it and give it the power of myth.” Midway through his career, it opened up a vein in his memory, leading to the mature period in which he would write Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations.