Much loved, yes. But Dickens’s novel is probably little read by modern audiences and so a chance to see a new adaptation of this tale of discontent, riot and general mayhem set in the French revolution and spread across London and Paris in the late 1700s should be a genuine treat for theatregoers.

When you are adapting a novel like A Tale of Two Cities, it's a privilege to sit with a great piece of writing for a considerable amount of time. You also feel secure (and a bit cheeky) in the knowledge that another writer has already done most of the work.

There are around 800 pages in a Dickensian doorstopper and it has been said around 800 times that if Dickens were working today he would be a show runner on a soap. Finally it has come to pass. Andrew Davies attempted something similar with his Bleak House, diced up into half-hour gobbets. But Dickensian is nothing less – or maybe that should be nothing more – than EastEnders in top hats and mobcaps.

Dickens’s public readings from his novels were almost as famous and popular as the novels themselves. He would write special scripts that gave prominence to particular characters and that dramatized the salient events of each story; and of all these performances, A Christmas Carol was one of the favourites, his and his audiences’. So what better idea than to turn this unforgettable tale into an opera: an opera for a single singer, dramatizing the story, impersonating all the main characters, being, as it were, Dickens himself with added music?

Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surely given him a very special quality in the nation's consciousness, a combination of general benignity with more than a hint of absent-mindedness, an almost madcap bafflement at the world.

Roger Rees, whose death at the age of 71 was announced yesterday, never intended to act. He trained at the Slade and made extra money painting theatrical scenery. One day a director asked if he’d like to act, and he laid down his brush. The second time he applied to join the RSC, he got in. He stayed with the company for a now unimaginable 22 years and in due course became one of the great stars of British theatre in the 1980s.

Delve into the personal life of Charles Dickens and she emerges, revealing another side of an author whose stories seem so wholesome. According to The Invisible Woman author Claire Tomalin, Ralph Fiennes’ film about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress is very different from the book upon which it is based. Scripted by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady and Shame), The Invisible Woman, in which Fiennes stars and well as directs, gives us a more complex view of Dickens-as-man, albeit through a dark lens, literally and metaphorically.

The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so remarkably copious: the novels, the journals, the letters, the readings; the charitable works, the endless walks; the awful childhood, the army of children, the abruptly terminated marriage, the puzzling relationship with two sisters-in-law, the long and clandestine affair.

Neil Bartlett, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Dickens adaptations of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, knows how to make gripping theatre out of a complex work of fiction. His Great Expectations rattles through the twists and turns of Pip’s coming of age with a pace that rarely lets up, so much so at times, that there is perhaps not enough space for reflection and  the emotional complexity of Dickens’s mature doesn't fully come through.

The opening of Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities is among the most famous ever written: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…". If the publicity for this stage adaptation is to be believed, it is a scarcely less exalted addition to the mythology surrounding this novel.