Dickens used to be considered only good for classic adaptations, but now both theatre and film directors are cottoning on to his ability to tell a good story. Steve Pratt reports.

CHARLES Dickens stands at the lectern in Newcastle's Assembly Rooms reading an extract from his story Great Expectations. Afterwards, he praises the citizens of the city for being "an unusually tender and sympathetic audience whose comic perception is quite up to the high London average".

And he adds that he has another reason for holding Newcastle close to his heart - a talented young actress named Ellen Ternan, who lived as a child in Westgate Street and then Pilgrim Street.

"I must confess to you that I became infatuated with Miss Ternan and that this infatuation caused the end of my 22 year marriage to Catherine, the mother of my ten children," he confesses.

His personal life begins to sound more like the plot of a soap than the life of one of literature's most cherished figures. He goes on to tell how he based the character of Estella in Great Expectations on Miss Ternan.

"There is little doubt that my feelings for her mirrored the kind of love that Pip has for Estella - an obsessive, dangerous and damaging love that it seems can never be consummated by marriage."

He leaves the Assembly Rooms to pose for photographers in the very Westgate Street where his young love grew up. His appearance causes passers-by to stare because they're surprised to see a man dressed in Victorian finery as cars and lorries thunder along the road behind him.

Dickens, as played by Northern Stage actor Jack Power, is back in Newcastle to talk about the company's production of Great Expectations at Britain's oldest Victorian theatre, The Journal Tyne Theatre, next month.

This is one of three stage versions of the story being produced at the moment. Northumberland Theatre Company is currently touring its production, with Royal Shakespeare Company staging its Great Expectations at Stratford-upon-Avon this Christmas.

OTHER Dickens projects are happening too. Roman Polanski's new film version of Oliver Twist is released next week and BBC1's reworking of Bleak House as a twice-weekly soap will be shown this autumn.

It all adds up to a Dickens boom as TV producers and film-makers rediscover his stories and put fresh twists on familiar tales. He used only to be good for faithful if dull BBC classic serials or prestigious movies that slavishly followed the original. The fact that he tells a good story is the obvious attraction for film and theatre people. But these days some add their own spin to the narrative, unafraid to take liberties with his work.

Andrew Davies, who adapted Pride And Prejudice for the BBC, has turned Dickens' Bleak House into soap opera-style episodes for BBC1. The makers say the 16 half-hour instalments will use the pace, multiple storylines and cliffhanger endings more usually associated with popular drama. The series boasts an all-star cast including Gillian Anderson, Charles Dance, Johnny Vegas, Matthew Kelly, Timothy West, Warren Clarke and Alistair McGowan.

They hope the fresh approach and offbeat casting will attract audiences, especially younger viewers, who wouldn't normally watch classic costume drama. "The Dickens novel was very much the soap opera of its day, and we hope to emulate those same cliffhanger emotions in televisual terms," says BBC Head of Drama Serials Laura Mackie.

She points out that Dickens' original readers enjoyed the novels in short instalments which ended in cliffhangers to persuade them to buy the next chapter. The new approach reproduces that in TV terms.

"Dickens seems particularly suitable because there are so many characters, there's such a lot of life, such a number of criss-crossing plots, that it would be interesting to do it in a new way, with shorter episodes and having a lot of characters in the background of each other's stories," says Davies.

"The heart of the story is a group of young people starting out in life, discovering themselves and what life holds for them, and I've tried to make the adaptation lively and accessible for viewers of all ages."

Northern Stage's Great Expectations will play up Dickens' North-East connections. The writer visited Newcastle on four occasions, including the Assembly Rooms in 1852 when he acted in a bill of three plays with fellow author Wilkie Collins.

His final visit to the city in 1861 was to read David Copperfield at Mr Grainger's now-demolished Music Hall on Nelson Street. The Newcastle Courant reported that the hall was filled "with the most respectable of people, gratified by the exquisite treat of hearing the novel read as perhaps no other man living could read it".

Director Neil Murray says the connection with Ellen Ternan was discovered while researching the background to the novel. Dickens was 45 when he met her and she was 18. Their relationship developed and continued until his death in 1870. She died in 1914.

"It's very much the kind of work that's an extension of what we've been doing at Northern Stage, the ensemble style of storytelling," he says. "The other reason it's a good piece to do is the actual story is fantastic. It's my favourite Dickens because it's a simple story, not overcomplex.

The most exciting thing is the themes it deals with are completely timeless and very, very powerful.

'PIP'S life is very much based on his incredible passion for Estella. We all know about that and empathise with being in love with the wrong person. That's why the novel works."

Murray, who is also designing the production, comes from Northumberland and has transferred the action involving young Pip and his graveyard encounter with the escaped convict Magwitch to that area.

Those opening scenes, depicting that scary meeting, have been filmed in that region for the staging which uses multi-media to tell the story.

"We chose the adaptation by John Clifford because it lends itself to develop an interesting presentation. It's not a play, it's a piece of theatre. You can't make a play out of Great Expectations because, by its nature, it's episodic."

Director Roman Polanki's new film of Oliver Twist is a more traditional take with enormous sets recreating 19th century London and the larger-than-life characters you associate with Dickens. "We are not going to strive for realism, quite the opposite," he said, explaining his vision.

"The characters in this story are larger-than-life with the emphasis on their glorious humour and eccentricities. This is a Dickensian tale in the truest sense, which means it's exuberant, intriguing and timeless.

"Above all it's a tale for a young audience. My ambition is to make the film for my own children. I read bedtime stories to them every night and I know what enchants them and how they identify with the characters."

Screenwriter Ronald Harwood, who regards Dickens as the greatest of English novelists, pinpoints another reason for his popularity - he wrote about the social problems of the time, whether it was the workhouses in Oliver Twist or the legal system in Bleak House. He didn't just observe, he often criticised as well.

Harwood wasn't afraid to make changes as well as editing a 350-page novel into a script for a two-hour movie. "We tell the story from Oliver's point of view," he explains. "It's a driving narrative. The great genius of Dickens is the storytelling power he has. What happens next? What happens next? And then, and then. It's breathtaking.

"One of the fascinating things in Oliver Twist, and probably in all Dickens novels, is that he deals with all layers of English society of that period. He does that better than anybody. He tells you what it was like to be alive then, which fiction can do much better than non-fiction."

* Great Expectation is at The Journal Tyne Theat re from October 10-15 (tickets 0191 232 1232) and then tours next year, including Durham Gala from January 19-21.

* Oliver Twist (PG) opens in cinemas on Friday.

* Bleak House is on BBC1 later this autumn.