It is as a detective story first and last that we have to consider The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He ended by inventing the new detective story. He began by completing the old romance of travel. It is permitted to Dickens, in short, to come to a literary end as strange as his literary beginning. He drops down dead as he is in the act of denouncing the assassin. Dickens dies in the act of telling, not his tenth novel, but his first news of murder. But Dickens, having had far too little plot in his stories previously, had far too much plot in the story he never told. Any Thackerayan could have completed the plot of Denis Duval except indeed that a really sympathetic Thackerayan might have had some doubt as to whether there was any plot to complete. But to Dickens it was permitted to die at a dramatic moment and to leave a dramatic mystery. But any one can see in Denis Duval the qualities of the later work of Thackeray the increasing discursiveness, the increasing retrospective poetry, which had been in part the charm and in part the failure of Philip and The Virginians. That great novelist, for instance, with whom Dickens is constantly compared, died also in the middle of Denis Duval. This is what separates the case in question from any parallel cases of novelists cut off in the act of creation. He never had but one thoroughly good plot to tell and that he has only told in heaven. The only one of Dickens's novels which he did not finish was the only one that really needed finishing. It seems rather like the last taunt of some elf, leaving the world, that it should be this story which is not ended, this story which is only a story. Something more seems hinted at in the cutting short of Edwin Drood by Dickens than the mere cutting short of a good novel by a great man. The Pickwick Papers showed how much Dickens could make out of other people's suggestions The Mystery of Edwin Drood shows how very little other people can make out of Dickens's suggestions.ĭickens was meant by Heaven to be the great melodramatist so that even his literary end was melodramatic. Edwin Drood, the last book, was a book designed by Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. The cast of characters often come into the audience as we are playing the part of the regulars at the Music Hall, and they attempt to curry favor for themselves and also opine on who they think the killer could be.EDWIN DROOD Pickwick was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled up by Dickens. Megan Falasco wears these identities like a coat, shedding them each time she takes on a new persona, and where will you see her next?) Jealousies, rivalries, secret loves, and hidden chambers all lay clues to who the killer would or could be-and everyone, it seems, has an agenda for wanting Edwin dead. Who has snuffed out the light of this young man (played by a woman, a total diva to her castmates at the Music Hall Royale. Edwin, who the show revolves around, ends up dead, but where is the body? The “cast” doesn’t know either-it’s a real whodunit. The “actors” of the music hall are debuting their own version of Edwin Drood, who also happens to be part of the cast. Set in Victorian London at the Music Hall Royale, we are watching a story within a story unfold. Written by Charles Dickens and adapted into a musical by Rupert Holmes, this delightful show runs until October 20. Welcome to the 2019/2020 season’s kickoff show for Steel River Playhouse in Pottstown, where The Mystery of Edwin Drood debuts.
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