THe SIGNAL-MAN
by Simon Blake,
adapted from the short story by Charles Dickens
Review from The Dickensian
by Dr Jean M. Elliott
(February 6 2016)
For the 1866 Christmas Number of All the Year Round, Dickens wrote The Signal-Man, ‘the best short story that Dickens ever wrote’ (Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, 2009). Informed by the terrible memory of Dickens’s own experience of the railway accident at Staplehurst only the year before, it is ‘a chilling tale of presentiment and foreboding’ (ibid).
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"A riveting and poignant piece of drama which will send you eagerly back to the original story wondering how you could have missed so much detail the first time around!"
The Walker is also developed into a thoroughly plausible character: totally oblivious of his own patronising manner, he is a gentleman curious about the details of a working-class life. Gentle humour is introduced as his well-meaning attempts to communicate always slightly misfire. Baffled that his own ’12 year old single malt’ should be dismissed as ‘an acquired taste’ by the Signal-Man, who prefers his own ‘fine blended grain’; a joke about being educated ‘above your station’ falls flat; and earnest references to Henry Mayhew spark little response in the stolid working Signal-Man.
This brief but brilliant story has been adapted and dramatised by Simon Blake, and turned into a superb piece of theatre. Blake has very skilfully transformed the hints from Dickens’s laconic reported speech narrative into thoroughly believable dialogue, and presents us with two distinctive and recognisable characters. The Signal-Man himself is given a fuller backstory (his father was a coal miner, disappointed that his son should be the first in the family to leave the mining trade); he expands on his attempts to educate himself; and he patiently explains to the Walker the details of the signalling mechanisms over which he presides: the telegraph, the electric bell, in short the means of ‘communication all the way up the line’.
Indeed, communication lies at the heart of this play.
Performances are masterly and pitch perfect
As in the original story, it is on his second visit to the Signal box that the Walker learns the details of the haunting apparitions. Again, Dickens’s brief hints are developed into a clear dialogue. And Dickens’s enigmatic reference to ‘the memorable accident on this line’ is expanded into a thrillingly detailed account. The vivid description culminates with the explosion of coal dust in the tunnel which created a pit fire and took ‘ten hours to extinguish’ – ‘the furnace effect’ observes the miner’s son.
The Walker’s well-intentioned attempts to provide rational explanations for the apparitions (including a bit of amateur psychology) lead on inexorably to the final – and fatal – act of miscommunication.
Simon Blake himself plays The Signal-Man and The Walker is played by Felix Trench. Both performances are masterly and pitch perfect. Felix Trench’s Walker is a thoughtful and thoroughly believable creation, engagingly sympathetic despite his pomposity. He is a perfect foil to Blake’s anxious yet conscientious Signal-Man, maintaining control but constantly checking lamps, levers and bells, the very image of a haunted man.
Together they create a riveting and poignant piece of drama which will send you eagerly back to the original story wondering how you could have missed so much detail the first time around!
The play is directed by Tania Azevedo and produced by Alex Murphy.
Those of us fortunate enough to have seen it as part of the Vault Festival at Waterloo had the added bonus of sitting in the Victorian tunnels (where once the Necropolis Railway ran) and thus enjoyed the ghostly sounds of trains passing constantly overhead, packed with present day commuters little knowing what was going on ‘Below there!’
Dr Jean M. Elliott
The Dickensian February 6 2016
The Signal-Man
by Simon Blake
Based on the classic short story by Charles Dickens
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