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| Book Cover via Amazon.com |
Opinion
Hello, my dear readers, I come to you with offerings of theater-quality goodness. Long ago, Dickens had penned a short story which I enjoyed when I was about 22. “The Signal-Man” scared me with polite and enthusiastic terror. Dickens isn’t the master of fear like Poe, but Dickens had a way with apparitions and spirits that few did for the time. Despite this, the one short story that resonated with me was about trains. So for you all today, I picked an adaptation of that short story, because it’s the theater adaptation. "The Signal-Man" has all of the fun of stage, and all of the fear of Dickens. I have my impressions on the initial story, but that will come on another day on another review. For now, this is about the theater version, and what I felt about it. Little known fact, my father was an actor, and he loved the job. I do have some love of the theater, but I assure you all it’s mostly the written bits of directions that I get a kick out of.
I digress, my first impressions of this book, I hate the title for how long it is. Also having “By Charles Dickens By Simon Blake” looks so weird to me. That said, don’t let the title scare you off or intimidate you because there is some good storytelling in this book. The cover is beautiful, it looks like a proper playbill.
As I opened up the story, I really enjoyed the detail work that was put into the stage design, directions, and notes. What I appreciate about these notes is that all the things I love about reading are handed to me in a side note so that I can just enjoy the tale as it unfolds without three paragraphs in the middle of dialog about what stuff looks like.
Critiques time, and honestly this book doesn’t fit into my standard critiques except for one. The reason it does not is that this is written in stage note directions and dialog. Obviously, this isn’t going to be the right kind of story for everyone, but I did want to let everyone know that this isn’t a book written like an ordinary book.
Therefore, the critique I have for this is the “Whole Story” part of my scoring. While this tells a beautiful story, in comparison to the short story, it does not tell the whole story. I’m disappointed. Though, I think the idea behind it was to let the stage effects and extra lighting cover some of the mystery involved with the actual story. That said, unfortunately, though the ending is good, it’s not the whole story.
Now let’s go into what I indeed did love. By having this as a set of stage notes and dialog we missed some of what was the bulk fluff of the Short story because it was placed in dialog in finely tuned layers. Things like the background and motivations of the main characters were settled nicely and sandwiched in polite conversation. I really enjoyed that. While it is brief, I also feel that this story would lend itself to encourage others to read the actual short story by Dickens.
The other bit that I love is how the stage notes fueled my imagination. There is so much beautiful scenery going on, and ideas about fire and lights and things. This would be a fantastic play. I’d love to see it. Heck, I think someone could even modernize it a bit, and make it into something that we all can get behind. But also if that never happens, this is fun to read and imagine while you read. You can take a moment and close your eyes and see whatever you believe.
Score
With all of that in mind, and after doing the math, I’m giving this fun theater version of a short story a score of 82/100 which is a 4 Star Review on Amazon and Goodreads. If you love theater, and you enjoy short stories, pick this up. It likely is going to be a fun afternoon for you and your imagination!
