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As Actor

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Dickens Onstage

Shorter Works

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The Pickwick Papers

Oliver Twist

Nicholas Nickleby

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David Copperfield

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

The Mystery of Edwin Drood
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The Mystery of Edwin Drood

  
Poster designed by Paul Davis.
Playwrights have also fallen under the spell of Dickens’s last – and famously unfinished – novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In England, Herbert Beerbohm Tree had some success as Jasper in an adaptation by Comyns Carr. The images in this exhibition of Tree as John Jasper show him to have been a darkly menacing stage presence. By far, the most successful has been the musical adaptation by Rupert Holmes, which opened in 1985 at New York’s Delacorte Theatre and subsequently played over 600 performances.