Theatre: Great Expectations

By Charles Dickens
Adapted by Nick Ormerod and Declan Donnellan
Directed by Andrew Lewis
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year Acting students
Geoff Gibbs Theatre
Until August 28

It’s unsurprising that those two mighty epics of relentless pursuit and ultimate redemption, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, are contemporaneous (the English novel was published in 1861; the other a year later). Neither is it surprising that both were instant and enormous successes, nor that they have generated many successful adaptations, across artforms, in the subsequent century-and-a-half.
This year’s WAAPA Acting graduating class performs the adaptation of Great Expectations by Cheek By Jowl’s Mick Ormerod and Declan Donnellan, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005. It’s a wise choice.