Wednesday 11 – Saturday 14 February 2009

Hard Times

By Charles Dickens, Adapted by Stephen Jeffreys
Directed by Andy Farrell

Matinee Performance on the 12th February at 2.30pm

The wide expanse of Dickens's novel, with its attack upon the stunting rigour of an industrial revolution which tended to convert workers into machines of hard labour, is triumphantly brought to life in this skillful adaptation of a literary masterpiece.

'…captures the volume of suppressed anger in the text, a passion whose delicate control makes a thriller out of mawkishness'. The Independent

'The strength of this version…is its preservation of the satiric vitality of Dickens' original, and a real feel for the superb rhetoric of his prose.' Time Out

Cast

Louisa Gradgrind - Katie Collier
Sissy Jupe/Mrs Blackpool - Tanya Huq
Mrs Pegler/Chairwoman/Mrs Gradgrind - Daisy Marsden
Mrs Sparsit - Fiona Carmouche
Rachel/Emma Gordon/Mary Stokes - Christine Clare
Joseph Bounderby - Nathan McMullen
James Harthouse - Matthew Walker
Stephen Blackpool - Colin Warner
Tom Gradgrind - Sam Edge
Mr Sleary/Waiter/Narrator - Thomas Walsh
Bitzer/Slackbridge - Oliver Pearson