Love, sex and money, poverty and exploitation, hope and despair: Dickens’s world is vividly brought to life in David Edgar’s adaptation of his 1838 novel. First staged by the RSC in 1980, it offered a powerful critique of Thatcherism. Now the transfer of the Chichester Festival Theatre revival by Jonathan Church and Philip Franks proves that this two-part drama remains a socially-relevant tale for our time, a reminder, as Dickens puts it, of “how much injustice, misery and wrong there was” – and is.

It is also exuberantly, unashamedly theatrical. Franks, Church and their ensemble succeed in balancing grotesquerie with detail and depth, so that every character, from the most eye-catchingly outlandish down to each incidental passerby, muffin-seller or tavern prostitute, suggests an entire existence. We are riveted by Pip Donaghy as the sadistic schoolmaster Squeers, enchanted by Wayne Cater and David Nellist as the philanthropic Welsh Cheerybles, and wildly entertained by the ham acting of the Crummles troupe of strolling players.

Equally, we are captivated by scenes of London street life, in which weary women rhythmically scrub steps, workers scurry to pittance-paid jobs that slowly destroy body and spirit, and hungry faces peer through a shop window at the unattainable delicacies on display.

Daniel Weyman’s Nicholas is not only the story’s linchpin and moral centre, but a young man with flaws and limitations, struggling to find his way and to control a violent temper. As his sister, Kate, Hannah Yelland shares his rage; in a society where lack of cash means disempowerment – the more so for females – she finds herself the subject of her own mother’s money-motivated marriage plans, and of the attentions of a lecherous toff. When the vile Sir Mulberry Hawk (Donaghy again) grabs viciously at her crotch and wrenches up her skirts, what he has in mind is not horseplay, it’s rape.

And there’s much more here to stir political passions and break the heart. David Dawson’s Smike is a ruin of a child-man, convulsed by fear and ill-treatment. David Yelland as Nicholas’s cruel uncle, Ralph, has a silkiness that you sense conceals the unwelcome protestations of his unhappy soul. His clerk. Newman Noggs (gangly Richard Bremmer), bravely clings to the tatters of his dignity and decency with his small acts of defiance and compassion.

And Zoë Waites delivers a trio of bravura performances as the deliciously ludicrous, faintly sad Fanny Squeers, as a seductive actress and as self-sacrificing Madeline Bray. Overall, a triumph of theatrical storytelling.

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