Great Expectations

Pip, a poor village boy, finds two chance meetings set his life on an unexpected course. At the water’s edge, he has a terrifying encounter with an escaped convict. In the decaying grandeur of Miss Haversham’s house, he falls hopelessly in love with the heartless Estella. When an anonymous benefactor helps him move to Calcutta, the heart of the British Raj, Pip pursues his great expectations and his dream of winning Estella’s heart. Relocating Pip’s extraordinary journey to nineteenth-century India, this coming-of-age story, evoking some of Dickens’ most colourful characters, is faithful to the period of the book and the richness of Dickens’ language – a vivid theatrical retelling of a universally loved masterpiece.

Over the past 25 years, Tanika Gupta has written over 25 stage plays that have been produced in major theatres across the UK and has written extensively for BBC Radio drama. Some of her theatre credits include: A Doll’s House (Lyric Hammersmith) Red Dust Road – adaptation of Jackie Kay’s memoir (NT Scotland); Bones (Central School for Speech and Drama) Hobson’s Choice (Manchester Royal Exchange); Lions And Tigers (Globe Theatre); A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Hull Truck Theatre); Midsummer Night’s Dream (Globe Theatre –Dramaturg); Anita and Me (Birmingham Rep); Love N Stuff (Theatre Royal Stratford East); The Empress (Royal Shakespeare Company); Wah! Wah! Girls - A British Bollywood Musical (Sadler’s Wells); Mindwalking (Bandbazi Theatre); Great Expectations (Watford Palace Theatre/English Touring Theatre); Meet The Mukherjees (Bolton Octagon Theatre); White Boy (National Youth Theatre/Soho Theatre); Sugar Mummies (Royal Court Theatre); Gladiator Games (Sheffield Crucible Theatre); Hobson’s Choice (Young Vic); Fragile Land (Hampstead Theatre); Inside Out (Clean Break); Sanctuary, Brecht’s The Good Woman Of Setzuan and The Waiting Room (National Theatre); Skeleton (Soho Theatre); and A River Sutra (Indoza). Some of her Television credits include: Doctors, London Bridge, All About Me, EastEnders, Grange Hill, The Bill, Flight, Banglatown Banquet, Our Lives As Animals ,The Fiancee and Bideshi. Some of her Radio credits include: Trumpet, A Passage To India, Death of a Matriarch, The Home and The World, Emma, Writing The Century, Bindi Business, Song Of The Road, The God Of Small Things, Baby Farming and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In 2008 Tanika was awarded an MBE for Services to Drama and in 2016 was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Tanika has an honorary doctorate in the Arts from Chichester University and is an Honorary Fellow at Rose Bruford College and Central School of Speech and Drama. She won the James Tait Black award in 2018 for her play Lions and Tigers. Charles Dickens (1812-70) was an English writer, generally considered to be the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and responsible for some of English literature's most iconic novels and characters. He continues to be one of the best-known and most read of English authors, with multiple adaptations of his work frequently being produced.