Post watershed Dickens completely misses the point
THERE is a darkness at the heart of Dickens that's easy to overlook. It underpins every one of his stories. Why else do West End musicals pivot on a scene in which a young woman is murdered by her psychotic partner? How else to explain why the most Christmassy Christmas story ever written has a scene in which a crone boasts about pinching the curtains from a man's death-bed - with the body still in-situ? People who say "let's darken Dickens" are right up there with those proclaiming "let's make fairy tales scary", they've just not done the reading. Quite literally. Which brings me to Steven Knight's new attempts to do a "gritty Great Expectations". I confess I was puzzled by this framing of a book which starts with an orphan boy in a graveyard surveying the graves of his dead relations. What quickly became apparent is that the new version, rather like Knight's similarly "adult" take on A Christmas Carol a couple of ye