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THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY Mobil Showcase Network, Jan. 10-13

The tragedienne Mrs. Crummies, great of girth and spirit, explains to Nicholas why she had to give up her title role in The Blood Drinker: "The audiences, sir," she sighs and smiles, "they could not stand it. It was too... tremendous!"

Modern audiences had no such difficulty with the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. In London in 1980 and a year later on Broadway, David Edgar's 8½hour adaptation of the Dickens novel met with a rapturous reception. In a time when many serious playwrights are hell-bent on reducing life's dilemmas to their sparest parts, panhandling for quiddity, Edgar and Directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird served up a copious celebration of life in all its wickedness and wonder. Led by Roger Rees as the callow, rigorous hero, 39 R.S.C. actors played 150 parts; they set the scene and moved the scenery; they patrolled the rafters and eavesdropped on intimacies. Everywhere in this complex living organism a sense of theatrical community was affirmed, with a dazzling display of stagecraft that never relaxed its grip on the intelligent heart.

In summer 1981, just before embarking for the U.S., the Nickleby company faced a new challenge: how to transfer its achievement, on tape, to TV. Would the production be "too ... tremendous" to fit into the home screen? Ideally, actors would have crept out of the TV frame, perched on top of the console, strolled across the living-room rug to shake out the viewer's passive complacencies. Practically, TV Producer Colin Callender and Director Jim Goddard had two options. They could create a new production for television, with naturalistic sets and discrete scenes, thus reducing the grand babble to Masterpiece Theater whispers. Or they could allow the actors to trace their familiar patterns, asprawl on the big stage, and catch as catch can. They chose the latter, and it was a wise choice; now this epochal production is preserved as fact, not as the fond memory of the 125,000 or so theatergoers lucky enough to have seen it.

It may, however, be initially confusing to millions of Nickleby novices. As host for the four-night series, Peter Ustinov provides helpful plot synopses and snippets of historical background, but he leaves some important unanswered questions for home viewers. Why are most of the actors doubling and tripling their roles? Why are characters breaking off a scene to describe their actions in the imperious third person? Why, when two characters are supposedly alone in a room, are other actors standing around watching them? Why, if this is television, does the camera occasionally cut to a theater audience cheering the performers—even, on two occasions, giving them perfunctory standing ovations? And why, if it is the record of a theatrical experience, does the director make use of such video effects as rapid cutting and multiple exposure? All these are conventions, of stage or small screen, to which the viewer must and can accommodate himself.