Charles Dickens has always been one of my favourite novelists. I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but when I was about five or six, someone got me the audiobooks of Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities, and I would listen to both over and over again until I was finally old enough to read them for myself. As an adult, I’ve grown to love The Pickwick Papers and Great Expectations, but none of Dickens’s writing will have the same place in my heart as those early stories which gripped my imagination and stirred my social conscience for the first time.

I think a sense of social consciousness and moral outrage makes A Tale of Two Cities the perfect play to stage in 2016 – a tale in which a bitter class struggle rages; where the fear of one’s own fellow countryman is only surpassed by one’s mistrust of outsiders and unknowns. This is a rich period drama, but the way Dickens writes spans centuries. Mike Poulton’s lush adaptation of the classic novel stays true to the original text, allowing Dickens’s characters and words to speak across the decades to a modern audience.

The cast of this co-production from the Touring Consortium Theatre Company and Royal & Derngate Northampton is a large one, with a number of players assuming roles of jurors in the courtroom, dancers at the wedding, and revolutionaries at the guillotine. However, each of the central characters are played by strong actors – no weak links in this chain – making the narrative easy to follow, despite the large number of people on stage. Shanaya Rafaat as Lucie Manette is warm and strong, Noa Bodner as Madame Defarge is towering and terrifying, but for me, the best character on stage is Joseph Timms’s Sydney Carton. Carton is a broken man, complicated by his past, his self-loathing, and his love for Lucie Manette. Timms embraces his character so fully that at the curtain call he is holding back tears from his impassioned concluding speech.

A Tale of Two Cities will be at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday 24th, and it’s quite unlike anything that’s been on there for quite a while. If you fancy getting lost in a richly-reimagined French revolution tale, go and see this immediately!     ★★★★☆     @BookingAround    21^st September 2016