As a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, David Mynne wasn’t a big fan of Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations. “It’s boring and it’s hard to understand the language,” he says of his introduction to the work.
As Mynne grew older his perspective changed. Now he finds himself as the star and co-adapter of a one-man show of Great Expectations. The show, which originated in 2013, opens tonight at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Great Expectations has a limited run and closes on Sunday.
“Later I re-read it and understood it and he writes beautifully,” Mynne says over the phone from a meeting room at the theatre. “The reason I chose Great Expectations is I just watched a BBC adaptation in 2012 with Gillian Anderson playing ‘Miss Havisham.’ I thought, that’s what I should do. Great story, lots of characters. Yeah, I could do Robinson Crusoe with two characters, but it’s not as interesting as trying to play 14 characters.”
If you haven’t read Great Expectations, in short it is the journey of a young boy named Pip. He encounters an escaped convict while visiting a cemetery. That chance encounter changes the trajectory of his life. He falls in love with a young girl named Estella, has to deal with the overly-controlling Miss Havisham and  has a rocky relationship with his brother-in-law, a blacksmith whom Pip rejects. As Mynne says, “There’s hurting and pain. Even Pip, who is a lovely boy who gets frightened by the convict, even Pip changes to be a pompous arrogant young man. Yet he finds his way back.”
Getting older was another motivation for Mynne to embark on this project. “I reached 65,” he reveals, “and in the UK that’s the time and age and I felt this was the time of doing my one-man show. I had always dreamed of doing one. The pension was fast-approaching and there is not a lot of work for old actors.”
Mynne is a founding member of Kneehigh, a Cornwall-based theatre company that has had great success with a number of shows including Brief Encounter which previously played at the Wallis and The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk that opens February 23rd at the theatre.
The work of Charles Dickens has succeeded very well on stage. Of course A Christmas Carol is performed every year around the world. The Royal Shakespeare Company had a smashing success with Nicholas Nickelby. Why does Mynne think Dickens translates so well to the stage? “Apart from the beauty of the language, he writes wonderful characters. His storylines are interesting. Remember, he wrote serially and a chapter would go out each week and eventually it would become the book and he’d publish the book. If he were writing today, Dickens would be a script writer probably. He would be writing Hollywood movies or a soap for television because he writes in that style.”
If you watched the halftime show at the Super Bowl, you know that technology and spectacle seem to be the name of the game. Â So what does a one-man show, offering a 90-minute adaptation of a 544-page novel, with only the minimalist of props offer contemporary audiences? Is it really just about the storytelling?
“That’s exactly what I aim to do,” Mynne says. “I do it in the simplest way, as simple as I can. There are no wigs, no costumes, a few props. I call what I do storytelling with extras. You get characters and you get voices, but really it’s so simple. As we developed the work over the years, I’m aiming to tell the story and draw people in. It’s faced-paced with a lot of plot and words to take in and all I’m asking the audience to do is take them in. I make people work quite hard. I’ve been on stage in spaces with people with their eyes closed during a performance. In the early days I thought I had lost them. Actually I found I reached them and they wanted to hear the words and the sounds. It’s simplicity.”
Before hanging up I asked Mynne about a quote from Dickens who said, “A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.” If someone told Mynne’s story, what would make his story good? “Wow. I’m stumped,” he said. “Coming from a poor background with a family that was totally uncultured, had no interest in the arts whatsoever and still doesn’t. I was never taken to the theatre or the cinema. We didn’t read books or newspapers. They don’t understand. I’m an alien. I have this wonderful life full of culture. I read, I write. I perform. I paint. I suppose it’s the joy of finding something so wonderful in the arts. What are we without culture?”