Janet Dulin Jones
I hear two legends of stage and screen, Sir Trevor Nunn and Brian Cox, are working together on a play about a young Charlies Dickens.
The playwright is Janet Dulin Jones – an American living in Primrose Hill for many years – who got the idea for a script after visiting the Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury in the early 1990s.
Back then, she was able to rifle through the writer’s letters and books – exhibits that are now held under lock and key for safe keeping.
Ms Jones told me: “I remember reading all these notes on the page in Oliver Twist, where Bill Sikes murders Nancy. And his underlining. I remember looking at my friend and saying, ‘my god, he is so prolific, and amazing’. And thinking ‘but what was he doing before then? Who was he before, and how did it lead to this?’”
She set about writing a script about Dickens’ “epiphany”, aged 23, when he decided to quit the Morning Chronicle paper he started working on as a Parliament reporter in 1834.
Ms Jones said: “It got to the point where he wanted a new job. He was going through the stress of writing and not being paid enough. He was 23 and he had two sisters who needed help with dowries. His younger brother was living with him. He was working seven days a week. He decides ‘I can’t go on like this’.
“So he talks to a barrister friend who says he can come to his firm and clerk. He was told he was so bright and such a good writer he could be a magistrate. He took the job, quit the paper and was due to start this job – but never showed up, and nobody knows why.”
Now a few great writers have wrenched themselves away from the New Journal over the years, often seeking a wider audience or a grander salary, with varying success.
Each time, a little bit of their soul dies. I wonder if Dickens felt this too?
Ms Jones, who had been working on various screenplays for Warner Brothers in Hollywood, said she thought of Dickens very much as a writer of the Romantic era, often mistakenly thought of as a Victorian.
She had lapped up his novels from youth, and would “watch the movies of Oliver Twist and Copperfield over and over”.
Her play, Charles Dickens, Morning Chronicle, had a running time of five and a half hours and was put on at the Willamstown Festival with the audience getting served a slap-up lunch in the interval.
She told me about her doubts about writing a play about Dickens, partly because “I can’t talk about this great English novelist as an American. I haven’t won a Tony. I haven’t won an Oscar.”
Almost 30 years later, the stars have aligned.
An unlikely sequence of contacts led to the script landing on Mr Nunn’s desk – and he wrote back with a warm letter of interest that Janet said made her “weep for two hours”.
Sir Trevor, famous for musicals Cats and Les Misérables and also for heading the Royal Shakespeare Company, is joined by Mr Cox, another resident of Primrose Hill, and director Michael Oakley.
The play has been cut from its mammoth run time to a fly three-and-a-half hours “but with no dinner”.
Janet said: “I’m an American and I have literally got to write with the greatest English director. If you tried to make it up you couldn’t. Now I’d love us to get a six-week run and then go to the West End and run forever.”
The play, which is not a musical but contains original songs, is devoted to her friend Jeanie Hackett, a celebrated actor and director who died of lung cancer during the Covid pandemic in 2022.
