JIMMY JEWELL for Ladida Productions in association with The Production Exchange present ‘Sikes & Nancy’ by Charles Dickens performed by James Swanton
Charles Dickens adapted ‘Sikes and Nancy’ from the grislier material in Oliver Twist. It became the most notorious of his legendary Public Readings; a masterpiece of high Gothic melodrama. Audiences were shocked into silence. Women would scream and faint. ‘I shall tear myself to pieces,’ Dickens vowed before one performance. He surely did – it is now thought that the strain of ‘The Murder’ hastened Dickens’s early death.
