STAGE REVIEW: Great Expectations - at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Thursday, February 8 to Saturday, February 10, and Thursday, February 8 to Saturday, February 17. Also matinees on Thursday, Friday and Saturday - 10.15, 13.00 and 14.30 respectively.

IT could possibly be argued that one of our greatest authors, Charles Dickens, had a bit of an obsession about Christmas.

A Christmas Carol is the perfect Christmas story and there were others he wrote such as The Chimes, all part of five book titles and stories in periodicals about the Festive time of the year.

Now, here in his powerful offering about love, greed and indomitable spirit, the story opens and ends on Christmas Eve - but 29 years apart.

Great Expectations though is far from a Christmas tale as it delves into the trials, tribulations, as well as the travels and travails of a young man expecting more out of life than existing in a rural backwater where he is indentured to the village blacksmith who had taken him in when his parents died.

It’s a truly compelling story, written by Dickens when he was right at the top of his game with around a dozen other titles by then to his credit and to do such a wonderful work and its extraordinary characters justice on the stage is quite a challenge.

So it’s great credit to Tilted Wig Productions and Malvern Theatres that their co-production just about pulls it off due in no small measure to Ken Bentley’s adaptation and the vision of director, Sophie Boyce Couzens.

There are a few moments though when you wonder what is trying to be achieved, such as a large metal framework box-cum-cage which dominates the set throughout.

At first I was thinking it was a touch stingy - using only half the performing area, and somewhat rough around the edges. But catching up on the programme notes at the interval, and taking on board designer James Turner’s reasoning and interpretation of events, it became far clearer than many of the excellent dark, brooding moments which dominate this epic tale.

This was the music box, or - as Turner explained - ‘the story box’ which clearly lent itself to the movement of time, place and characters with most members of the cast playing more than one role.

Only the two main persona Sean Aydon as Pip and award winning actress Nichola McAuliffe as Miss Havisham stay in the same parts. He is workmanlike, functional and in need of a little more colour, while she is so splendidly eccentric and haunting as the spurned Miss Havisham should be.

Magwitch produced the necessary menace and evil on the surface via Daniel Goode and there were a couple of other fine performances from Edward Ferrow as Joe, the humble and likeable blacksmith, and James Dinmore’s entertainingly foppish Pumblechook, Jaggers and others of more serious note.

It’s a relatively lengthy production of around two hours and 45 minutes, including an interval, and it needs to be recalled that Dickens originally intended the book was going to be twice as long. So adapting it for a touring production was quite a task.

The target was clearly achieved in producing a totally absorbing evening.