‘It was heard from beginning to end with the deepest attention and most manifest delight.” Thus reported The Times on the first public performance by Charles Dickens in 1866 of his short story (now monologue) Dr Marigold’s Prescription, which its indefatigable creator had rehearsed a mind-boggling 200 times. The same audience reaction was observable as the distinguished actor Simon Callow presented this gripping tale — with its characteristically Dickensian fusion of humour and pathos — at the Oxford Playhouse on Monday.

That Mr Callow has in the past proved an able impersonator of our greatest novelist (in another one-man show, The Mystery of Charles Dickens) lends an added dimension to Dr Marigold and Mr Chops. It is as if we are seeing the writer himself upon the stage, engaged in the activity that he relished almost above all others (and which was ultimately, perhaps, to cost him his life).

Callow’s famously bravura acting style — his gift for accents and well-judged phrasing — is ideally suited to an entertainment of this sort, with its larger-than-life characters of a type so familiar from Dickens’s rollicking fiction. Here, on either side of the interval, we meet two principally — both of them lovable rogues who come instantly to life through the words they have been given to speak and the way these are spoken.

Barnstorming, mutton-chop-whiskered showman Toby Magsman tells us the story — in Welleresque Cockney speech, all ’eads, widders and the like — of “the kindest little man what never growed”. He is the dwarf Mr Chuff, who swaps the life of a show freak to one of unaccustomed luxury following a lottery win, only to find that high society is not what he thought it.

Travelling salesman Dr Marigold,by contrast, has never had any illusions about the ruling class, seeing politicians to be every bit as ‘cheap jack’ as he is. The comic opening at the expense of these abruptly gives way to a darker tone, however, with a story concerning his deaf and dumb adopted daughter that one respected Dickens biographer considers to surpass in sadness even that of Tiny Tim.

Ably directed by Richard Twyman, the show continues until Saturday. Tickets: 01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse com).