Simon Gray’s Little Nell (2007) dramatically imagines the clandestine thirteen-year relationship between Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan, an actress nearly thirty years his junior. The play opens with the climax of The Frozen Deep (1856), a melodrama co-authored by Wilkie Collins and Dickens, in which Dickens, with characteristic egocentricity, took the lead role of an Arctic explorer who histrionically sacrifices his life for his love rival. It was at the semi-professional production of this play in Manchester in 1857 that Dickens engaged Frances Ternan and her two daughters to play the female roles, falling in love with the seventeen-year-old Ellen. Their blossoming relationship was the subject of scurrilous gossip when Dickens dramatically separated from his wife of nearly twenty-five years, Catherine, in 1858. In the period since Dickens’s death in 1870, more details of the affair have come to light, arousing intense speculation as to its exact nature and whether Ellen and Dickens had a child – or children – who may have died in infancy. Gray’s framing device is the juxtaposition of key moments in their union with the reported meeting, in 1922, of Dickens’s son, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, and Geoffrey Robinson, Ellen’s deceived son who was unaware of his mother’s acting career or the nature of her relationship with the world-famous author.

Gray pulls no punches and unreservedly asserts the sexual nature of the relationship, but the frisson of the couple’s initial encounters gives way to the grinding reality of duplicity and Ellen’s monotonous life sequestered in secret love-nests in Peckham and Slough. Counterpoised with Ellen’s suffering is the injurious effect on Dickens’s health of his own frenetic social and professional commitments, particularly his famous public reading of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, which he performed with such terrifying ferocity that it may have contributed to the stroke that killed him. Leaping forward to the period after Dickens’s death, Gray explores the strained relationship between Ellen and her husband George Wharton Robinson, the kind-hearted headmaster of a failing private school who is tormented by ineffable suspicions about his wife’s sketchy rendering of her past. To hoodwink her husband, Ellen has coolly shaved ten years off her age and presents her relationship with Dickens as that of an avuncular guardian to an innocent, awestruck child.

The piece is not without some of the general faults of biographical plays: Gray compresses events and the timeframe for dramatic effect, while the factual accuracy of some scenes is indefinite. Little Nell is obligated to Claire Tomalin’s pioneering biography of Ellen, The Invisible Woman (1990), which attempted to rescue Ellen from the condescension of history by foregrounding her life before and after Dickens. This debt is especially evident in Gray’s wholesale adoption of Tomalin’s dramatically satisfying, but unproven, hypothesis that Dickens suffered his fatal stroke at home with Ellen, who then moved the prostrate, dying man by carriage to his family home in Kent to avoid a scandal. Gray also retains Tomalin’s feminist emphasis on Ellen’s restricted life as the secret mistress of a man famed for his domestic morality; in the final scenes, Ellen angrily reacts against the injustice of her invisibility, chiding Dickens for his hypocrisy and neglect. For Gray, Nelly’s experience of the relationship is soured by a growing sense of loneliness, abandonment and revulsion.

Whatever your opinion, the piece evidences a convincing emotional truthfulness, in which Dickens and Ellen appear as entirely human in their emotional complexity and the difficult, shabby and damaging compromises they make. Geoffrey Robinson angrily demands to know, ‘What sort of man was Charles Dickens?’ and Gray answers with a multifaceted Dickens who is simultaneously energetic, charming, thoughtful, generous and loving, as well as selfish, controlling, deceitful and unscrupulous. Thus, in a particularly startling moment, Dickens presents the recently deflowered Nelly with a ‘towel’ he has brought with him, suggesting a chilling element of forethought and manipulation on his part as he piteously intones, ‘Poor mouse!’

Intriguingly, the emotional heart of the play is often found in the scenes between the two wounded sons, as both sift through the emotional debris of strained or broken parental relationships. An initial hesitancy and suspicion gives ways to a touching, weary rapprochement as both diffidently reveal their struggles to accommodate the failings of their parents and the suffering of Catherine Dickens and George Wharton Robinson. The former, in an unforgettable image, is described secretly howling with grief in an empty house. The revelation of the truth has a powerfully liberating effect on Geoffrey, freeing him from the unsolvable enigma of his obfuscating mother to pursue a more fully realised, independent life (as an actor, no less).

This is an impressive production of a subtle, shifting and complex piece, directed with great confidence and skill by Simona Hughes. Andy Murton impresses as Dickens, skilfully depicting his shifting states of mind, from quixotic, charming and amorous to exhausted, wrathful and self-pitying. Angharad Ormond is similarly strong as Ellen, amply delineating her trajectory from an eager, ingenuous, affectionate young woman, enthusiastically embarking upon a life-changing relationship with a magnetically attractive, famous man, to a disappointed mistress chafing against the restraints of subterfuge imposed by bourgeois respectability. More than holding their own against these two notable performances are Nicholas Cannon and Alistair Maydon as the sons. Cannon subtly and touchingly conveys Geoffrey Robinson's confusion, distress, anger and shellshock, imbuing the character with a quiet dignity in tension with his agitation. Maydon is a memorable Sir Henry Dickens, at once worldly, composed, business-like and slightly patronising, but also sympathetic and generous. There is solid support from Leon Chambers as the frantic, vexed George Wharton Robinson and Justin Stahley as Canon Benham, a comically unscrupulous clergyman who counsels Ellen to silence for the sake of propriety before swiftly sharing her secrets with a disreputable biographer. One minor quibble would be that the richly realistic design of Sir Henry Dickens’s office sits a little uncomfortably with the more impressionist and Spartan backdrops for the Victorian scenes, while the sound design and music could have perhaps been a little richer. Gray's play remains contentious in some of its particulars but it is dramatically and emotionally engaging, particularly in such a thoughtful, engrossing and assured production.

Photography by Ruth Anthony