Sydney Carton, wastrel and dissolute, black sheep and fallen angel, whose words on the scaffold secure him a place in the quotation books, remains as potent a creation today as he was when Dickens’ poignant classic was first published. His ‘double’, Charles Darnay, who mirrors what Carton could have been and who wins the hand of Lucie whom Carton also loves, remains a satellite of goodness in this tale of sacrifice and hate. Their lives and fates, inextricably linked, merge again in the figure of Paul Shelley who brings them both to life in this authentic dramatisation.