Stage review: Andersen's English, Hampstead

The words - as you would expect - flow thick and fast. They toy leisurely with grand ideas, luxuriate in their space (they alone are blessed with the commodity) and deal with marital awkwardness without a stutter.

For this is the claustrophobic, hectic house of Charles Dickens in Gad's Hill in 1857 and, added to the confusion of children, sidestepped emotions, hillocks of furniture and carefully calibrated gaps between diffident couples, there is Hans Christian Andersen, the children's author and house guest who observes this tumult with an author's eye for discord but a clunky ear for a foreign language.

This central conceit - by playwright Sebastian Barry, handled by director Max Stafford Clark - offers comic relief in a hand-wringing piece that is fluid and finely acted but speckled with missed opportunities.

Danny Sapani finds warmth and comedy in a character who offers the audience an invite into the Dickens' soap opera but not much else. His one useful role is to understand the plight of Catherine Hogarth, baby-machine, genius-prop and out-of-favour spouse.

She shares with the Danish man her heartache, offering lines that he cannot understand to play out on an Englishman who chooses to understand them even less.

For Dickens is an unfeeling whirlwind capable of unerring sentiment on the page but not in the home. David Rintoul makes these contradictions richly human in his portrayal of a man plagued by a fierce, if misdirected, energy.

It is left to Catherine to hold the house together and the anguish and confusion displayed by Niamh Cusack is palpable and moving.

There are subplots too - Lisa Kerr's Irish maid is affecting as the resolute - and pregnant - maid who defies her master's cloying hand of benevolence. Dickens' daughter Kate (Lorna Stuart), son Walter (Alastair Mavor) and sister-in-law Georgie, a curiously clinical acolyte (Kathryn O'Reilly) all bear the wounds of their many swirling turns in the author's gravity.

And they are not alone in their head-spinning wooziness.

Writer Barry flicks specks of bright colour at the canvas. Step back and they make sense - but distance is what is required from a production that is crammed to the gills with just so much stuff.

- Andersen's English runs at the Hampstead Theatre until May 8. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com

– From April, 2010