Great Expectations (Introduction by j. Snodgrass)

Here's a classic tale of English hierarchy:

A rich man on a carriage ride ordered his driver to stop, there was a poor man by the roadside.

“Pardon me,” the rich man said, “but are you eating...grass?”

“Yes, sir, this is the extent of my poverty.”

“This will not do – I insist you come to my manor tonight and be my guest for dinner.”

“Well thank you sir, but I have a wife and six children--”

“Bring them too! There's plenty to eat!”

So the man arrived with his family and the rich man opened the gate. “I hope you all brought a big appetite! As you can see I have a large lawn, all I ask is that you leave a half inch.”

That old joke keeps popping into my head as I think about this play. There's no such thing as a free lunch in the economy of Great Expectations – it's a sort of Capitalist Cinderella story, moving from rags to riches to dreary realism to resignation. The story is a mystery, and I don't want to give away any hundred-seventy-year-old plot-twists. But I'd like to offer a brief orientation into the world, or really worlds, of nineteenth century England.

Great Expectations takes place in two distinct spatial realms – the swamp and the city. Pip spends his childhood in the “Marshes,” meaning swamp-land around Rochester (the other Rochester, about 30 miles east of London). If London was the Big Apple, the Marshes might be the Meadowlands of New Jersey, the swamp you drive through before taking the George Washington Bridge or Holland Tunnel into Manhattan. Or if London was downtown Buffalo, the marshes would be Beaver Island. The first half of this play, Pip's childhood, will take place in the marshes and then in the second act he'll be a young man in the big city.

Thirty miles is five hours in a horse-drawn carriage from one location to the other. But the story is also about social locations, which are worlds apart. Remember, social mobility was the magical-realism fairy-tale element that made this story so popular in its own time. So we'll take a quick tour of the social locations in 19th century England.

In this fractured fairy tale Dickens starts us all the way at the bottom, with the dead. We first meet Pip visiting the graves of his parents and five dead siblings. It's important to start underground because the central character goes by the nickname of “Pip,” an old English term for a seed. And one of the central questions driving the story is – will the seedling sprout into a dignified fruitful family tree? He is one Pip from a bunch of Pips, and he theorizes that his sibling-seeds didn't sprout because they were born with their hands indolently shoved in their pockets, too lazy to earn a living. So Pip's got a chip on his shoulder about that.

In the social order of 19th century England, barely a step above the dead are convicted criminals whose property has been confiscated and whose prospects are nothing. The prisons of England were so full that the government used “Hulks,” ships that were no longer seaworthy, anchored in bays as auxiliary prison-space. And any trouble on the Hulks was punishable by permanent exile in “New South Wales,” what we now call Australia. Pip has a traumatic childhood encounter with an escaped prisoner, and will be haunted by the idea that criminality is contagious – contact will turn him into a thief and a liar, and he'll be plagued with guilt over it.

Pip is an orphan, but he's fortunate to have a surviving older sister to keep him out of the workhouse, or else we'd be here to see the musical of Charles Dickens' “Oliver.” He doesn't start the story with nothing – he's already in debt. His sister keeps reminding him that he owes her for raising him “by hand,” (double meaning: administrator of gruel and cruelty).

Pip's sister is married to a friendly blacksmith named Joe, whose catch-phrase “What Larks” means mirth, jollity, frolicks. There's just no other way to define it. Joe is good-natured, and he has to be. As a blacksmith his income (adjusted) is nine thousand dollars a year, and his life-expectancy is short. Joe's uncle is a grain merchant, well-to-do enough to show up at Christmas with bottles of sherry and port-wine.

So here we've got Pip, lucky not to be in the ground, situated in the world of the blacksmith and horse-cart mechanic and church accountant, condescended to by the livestock feed salesman. But then by some novel happenstance he gets a glimpse through the gate at another world – the world of wealth. Uncle Pumblechook rents him out as a sort of circus animal so that his landlord, an eccentric spinster, can watch a kid play.

Twenty-five years ago, Miss Havisham was a hot commodity on the marriage market. Like if someone made a gameshow, “the Bachelorette – Beer-barrel edition.” Bachelors were competing to win her father's brewery, with this debutante thrown in as a bonus. Then in disgust at being bartered, she dropped out of the game and decided to marry for love. But then she was ditched at the altar, and decided to let it all rot – lock, stock, and barrel. What's expected is that she'll eventually put this wealth into the hands of some male relative or friend. But she's up to something else.

In the crumbling ruins of her manor, ironically called “Satisfaction House,” she has become a bit of a mad scientist. Miss Havisham is conducting a sadistic experiment in weaponizing desire: turning an adopted daughter, Estella, into a doll to be objectified so that she can entrap some unsuspecting gentleman and make his life miserable. Gradually we realize Pip is being rented as a punching bag, a fencing dummy, human prey to train an apex sexual predator.

For his service as a human target, Miss Havisham will pay twenty five guineas - in modern terms, about five thousand dollars – not to Pip, but to his guardian Joe Gargery the blacksmith. She sponsors Pip's apprenticeship, in modern terms covering his tuition for a trade-school. The master blacksmith has to be compensated in advance for lost productivity: the apprentice is going to require lecturing and make some mistakes, so Miss Havisham pays Joe for that (we get the feeling he'd do it for free, especially when he's played by Adam Yellen, but this makes it official, legitimate).

When this deal is done, Pip's net worth finally rises to zero.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Dickensian humor.

However, having been needled by Estella's jabs, calling him 'coarse and common,' Pip has fallen in love and fantasizes about being worthy to marry her. Then, quite suddenly, his blacksmith education will be interrupted by, you guessed it, Great Expectations.

The title is a pun. “Expectations” meant trust fund – there's a hidden stash of property, Pip gets little appetizers, but won't find out the whole enchilada till his twenty-first birthday (or, I don't know, I guess the British enchilada is some kind of meat-pie). The second meaning is that Pip expects that the wealth is in the form of renewable resources, profitable land and a reproductive lady partner. This would transform our swamp-child into a quote-unquote “lord” meaning a landlord who can collect rent, and a quote-unquote “gentleman” meaning someone who has a personal manicurist (Pip is very self-conscious about his cuticles).

Pip begins receiving sums of money from an unidentified source through a lawyer – about twenty pounds sterling a month. The British Pound of 1860 is about a hundred and seventy US dollars today. So when he gets his monthly allowance, we should imagine about three thousand dollars. Then when he turns twenty-one his annual income is fixed at five hundred pounds, about eighty-five thousand dollars a year. This would set him up nicely in the marshes, but he's living the big city.

He's not allowed to get a job because a gentleman didn't work, his income came from owning things. But Pip doesn't own anything, so he's got just enough cash and credit to plunge himself into debt. He must keep up appearances as a charming man, although really he's just “a jumped-up pantry-boy who never knew his place.” Pip dresses and bejewels himself like a gentleman, but he suffers from imposter syndrome, and the claustrophobic city gives him dreams he's on a prison ship.

At the heart of the story, we'll find that Pip and Estella are both objectified. Pip has been rented out as a tchotchke, and then becomes a pawn in a game that he can't see. Estella is used as a sort of remote control attack-drone. And the two of them, having been dressed, posed and played like dolls, must find their humanity.

One of the interesting elements of this production is a soundtrack by the Cure, the Smiths and Joy Division: English music for an English story. But at a deeper level these songwriters, Robert Smith, Stephen Patrick Morrissey and Ian Curtis, grew up during the atomic arms race between the US and the USSR, when England, once a great global empire, was a helpless pawn stuck between these two superpowers. English working-class kids noticed that the Beatles singing “All You Need is Love,” and then a decade later the Clash singing “London's Burning” didn't change anything (you can imagine how that could make someone a bit gloomy and quirky). These were kids whose survival was in the unseen hands of social and economic forces totally beyond their control, so their songs will give us glimpses into the characters' alienation and paranoia.

In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 19th century British social ladder, from convicts, artisans and merchants up to the gentry. He himself had knowledge and experience of numerous rungs on the ladder. His father, for spending beyond his means, had spent time in debtor's prison, Dickens himself had been bartered into child labor, then worked as a legal clerk before becoming an author. He'd explored class issues in his novels Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities.

He wrote Great Expectations late in his career, as a serial released in twenty monthly installments, then a deluxe hardcover trilogy, and finally the chunky paperback we had to carry around in high school. In modern terms, it's a bit like those Netflix series where, at the end, you think “Oh, this would have been a great two-hour movie, but then some executive said 'No, it should be a nine-hour series,'” and next thing you know the central thread is cluttered with subplots and side-characters and clunky cliffhangers. Well with Nail Bartlett's adaptation script, the Irish Classical Theatre is going to fix that, streamlining this cumbersome 500-page series into a digestible two hour show. A lot will be missing, and few, if anyone, will notice.

I know I'm not supposed to spoil the ending, but there is one thing, and I'm only telling you because I don't want you to feel like something was missing when you leave the theatre. I told someone I'd be speaking about Great Expectations and they said “Oh, I saw the old movie once, with the guy staggering around at the end shouting 'ESTELLAAAAA!'” And I had to say, “no, that was the other old movie about the wounded spinster and the guy from the swamp.” So if you come to the show with great expectations of hearing that, you may be disappointed, but in this Dickensian world, you can't have everything.

Thank you, and I hope you'll enjoy the Irish Classical Theatre's production of Great Expectations.

john Snodgrass teaches at Canisius College, and is the author of several books including Supernatural Shakespeare: Magic and Ritual in Merry Old England (City of Light Publishing) and Welcome to Tragedy: A Beginner's Guide to Greek Drama (j-snodgrass.com). He has also written plays produced by the Alleyway, Buffalo United Artists, Green Buffalo Productions, and his full-length play Rust & Redemption will be staged by the American Repertory Theater this spring. He lives in Buffalo with his wife and their four children, including Jackson Snodgrass who recently appeared as "the Boy" in ICTC's production of Waiting for Godot.