A TALE OF TWO CITIES Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park

The major problem with Matthew Dunster’s adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities is that it is very difficult to know what is going on. All the modern “refugee crisis” additions get in Dickens’s way and makes Timothy Sheader’s versatile production unnecessarily long. Nor does it make sense to cast Sydney Carton white and Charles Darnay black when the whole point of the story is they are meant to look so amazingly alike that nobody can tell them apart.