The idea of resurrection, which runs through Marlowe Theatre’s A Tale of Two Cities now on a UK tour, applies not only to its characters but also to the adaptation itself. After 90 years, it has finally come to life on stage.
While the audience is still finding their seats, a man is already sitting on stage. As the performance begins, familiar words emerge through music that sounds almost like wordless voices: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” And so Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities begins.
What makes this production unusual is not the fact that Dickens’ novel has been brought to the stage, but that this particular adaptation has waited around 90 years to get there. In 1935, the young playwright Terence Rattigan worked with actor and director John Gielgud to adapt A Tale of Two Cities. Gielgud shaped the overall structure, while Rattigan focused on the dialogue. Their interest was not in creating a grand spectacle of revolution, but in the people caught inside it.
The production was planned, with casting and designs already under way, but it fell apart just two weeks before rehearsals were due to begin. Sir John Martin-Harvey had played Sydney Carton, one of the novel’s central characters, for many years in another adaptation. He strongly objected to Gielgud taking on the same role, and Gielgud eventually abandoned the project.
Yet the failure unexpectedly helped change the course of Rattigan’s career. After the production was cancelled, he was paid for his work on the adaptation and given the chance to show the producer another play. That play was French Without Tears. It became a major West End success the following year and made the 25-year-old Rattigan one of the most exciting young playwrights of his generation. The programme describes A Tale of Two Cities as an important turning point in his development, when he learned to bring together character, emotion, and theatrical storytelling.
And now, in 2026, Marlowe Theatre Productions has brought the script back to the stage. The 1935 adaptation is reimagined with a distinctly modern theatrical language. Michael Fentiman’s direction feels strikingly contemporary. Max Jones’ set has none of the grand French mansions or busy Parisian streets we might expect from a period drama. Instead, the stage is simple and open, built around clean, straight lines. The empty space is filled by the actors’ bodies, lighting, video, fog and music.
What stands out most is the way the production moves from one scene to the next. As music plays, the actors move across the stage, and at times the transitions unfold slowly, almost like a dance piece. When the characters line up at the back of the stage and are caught in the light, they look almost like figures in a painting. Fog hangs low, thin lines of light cut through the space, and video creates another layer of scenery. Here, a scene change is more than a way of getting from one scene to the next. The transition itself becomes part of the performance.
The production takes a simple approach to its “two cities”. The set remains largely unchanged as the story moves between London and Paris, with video and projections used to signal the change of place. The distinction between the two cities is not always visually strong, but the production avoids lengthy scene changes and keeps the story moving. When French is spoken, English subtitles appear. Rather than recreating 18th-century London and revolutionary Paris in realistic detail, the production lets the audience move quickly and smoothly between the two worlds.
Set around the time of the French Revolution and moving between London and Paris, Dickens’ novel centres on Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who turns his back on his family and settles in England, and Sydney Carton, a talented but deeply disillusioned lawyer. Both fall for Lucie Manette, while the uncanny resemblance between the two men becomes a crucial part of the story. A few lines of description can make this work in a novel, but on stage it is a different matter. For the story to work, the audience has to believe the two men really do look alike. When Samuel Collings’ Carton and Ed Sayer’s Darnay stand side by side and turn to reveal their profiles, the audience lets out a small gasp. They really do look alike. A detail that exists in words on the page suddenly becomes completely convincing in front of us.
Lighting, video, music and movement constantly reshape the stage, but the characters remain at the heart of the production. The huge historical events of revolution and the collapse of an old order are seen through individuals who love, choose and sacrifice. This connects with the approach Gielgud and Rattigan took in 1935: character before spectacle. At the same time, it fits with Dickens’ own desire to drive the novel forward through events. While writing A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens reportedly told his friend John Forster that, unlike his earlier novels, he wanted to put his characters through a series of events and draw the interest from what happened to them. This production does much the same. It throws its characters into the middle of a revolution and, over two hours, keeps the story moving quickly through their choices and relationships.
The programme notes that several periods of history meet in this work: the French Revolution, the Victorian age in which Dickens wrote the novel, the 1930s when Rattigan and Gielgud adapted it, and 2026, when the adaptation has finally reached the stage in a full production. Those layers of time are also part of the production’s own story. A play that disappeared just before rehearsals were due to begin has returned almost a century later with a new theatrical language.
In that sense, the idea of resurrection, which runs through A Tale of Two Cities, applies not only to its characters but also to the adaptation itself. After 90 years, it has finally come to life on stage. Yet it never feels like a historical curiosity pulled from an archive. Its fluid transitions and modern theatrical language make this old story feel firmly in the present.
A Tale of Two Cities continues its UK tour until February 27, 2027
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