Writer: Richard Fitchett
Director: Kevin Russell
Vinegar & Brown Paper is based on the real-life encounter between an 11-year-old American girl and Charles Dickens. It’s a tiny, but rather charming incident. It’s 1868 and Dickens is making an exhausting lecture tour of America – he would have his first stroke the year after. Hoping to grab some time on the journey, Dickens is busily working on Edwin Drood. He’s appalled to find he must share his carriage with the precocious Kate Douglas Smith, who has abandoned her seat beside her mother and deliberately tracked him down.
Beth Taylor plays Kate as a child, all braids and exaggerated mannerisms. She’s determined to strike up a conversation with the older writer and with ruthless persistence, keeps firing questions at him. Dickens feels, as we do, that she’s maddening and at some stage attempts to move carriage, only to find himself beside the even more maddening mother.
Somehow in the end Kate wins him over and the conversation between the unlikely pair ranges from his recent train crash with his mistress, Ellen Ternan (‘not Mrs Dickens’, he explains discreetly) to her adventures and the art of writing in general. Dickens sees an embryonic writer in her and at the end, we learn Kate Douglas Smith, now Kate Douglas Wiggin, has indeed become a successful children’s writer, the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903). She later recounts this episode as a short memoir, A Child’s Journey with Dickens (1912).
It’s a very slight premise on which to base a play and Richard Fitchett works hard to flesh it out. But to be honest, the more it’s padded out, the more it loses dynamism. The decision to include a third person, the adult Kate, played by Louise Morell, means switching our attention to a decidedly dull character whose only purpose is to reveal exposition in a clunky epistolary exchange with an off-stage sister. Keith Hill as Dickens does a good job of expressing exasperation and in brief moments, performing extracts from his work. We know Dickens’ performances were legendary and it’s a pity here we get short shrift. It would have been good to see more of the readings which gave him cult status in America.
Runs until 9 December 2023
