 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||
|
Reviews
|
|||||||
|
|
Oliver TwistAdapted and directed by Neil Bartlett from the novel by Charles Dickens Making a play from a novel - and particularly a nineteenth century novel - is fraught with difficulty, and all too often ends with an episodic trudge through parts of the plot, leaving fans of the novel complaining about what has been left out and others wondering, why bother? It's doubly difficult when the novel in question has already been made into a successful (if emasculated!) musical. Indeed two people sitting next to me in the Theatre Royal left after the first fifteen minutes, having been under the impression (one assumes) that they were coming to see the musical. So one might assume that Neil Bartlett was on a hiding to nothing in attempting yet another dramatisation of Oliver Twist and I have to confess to a feeling of "I don't really want to see this but I suppose I should" when I arrived at the theatre. And had Bartlett followed the usual route of such dramatisations, my reservations would probably have been more than justified. However this is not the route he has taken. He calls the production an adaptation "in twenty-four scenes with several songs and tableaux" and this gives a clue to the playing style.
But before moving on to discussing that style, we should note that he has followed Dickens in his characterisation. "Nancy, he says in a programme note, "is a teenage prostitute with a violent owner, not a musical-comedy star." Fagin is not a lovable rogue but a thorough-going villain with more than a hint of homosexuality in his relationship with his "boys" - and this is not a modern gloss: it's there for all to see in the text of the novel. This is black: it ends, not just with the murder of Nancy and the death of Sykes and Oliver's reuniting with the family he didn't knew he had, but also with Fagin's descent into madness and death in prison. And if we are to be true to Dickens, this is how it should be - not an emasculated feel-good musical with only one real villain (but even he has his human side: he loves his dog!). But it is the playing style which really makes the production for me. There is a stage on the stage, complete with footlights and a curtain. There are trapdoors. There is scenery which flies out, not with the smoothness of modern counterweight systems, or even the comparative smoothness of the older hemp lines, but with all the rumble and noise of Victorian stage machinery. The scene on London Bridge is particularly effective: the back wall rumbles out revealing a seemingly limitless black expanse behind; a door in a side wall opens and harsh sidelight floods across the stage. Simple but so very effective. It is melodrama. It is (at times) comedy. At times it is pure narration, at one point in choral speech. It is music: the cast sing to the audience, using contemporary music hall tunes, and some scenes are accompanied by music played on hurdy-gurdy, fiddle and serpent by members of the cast. It features tableaux, which resemble nothing so much as the sort of illustrations produced by Cruikshank and others of the period. In other words, Bartlett uses all the techniques of Victorian theatre to reproduce onstage the multitude of techniques Dickens uses on the page to move the audience.
It is also very much an ensemble piece: a cast of thirteen play over fifty parts, with only two playing just one: Michael Feast (Fagin) and Jordan Metcalfe (Oliver). Owen Sharpe, who plays Dodger, also plays the narrator. It feels wrong in such an excellent ensemble (for it was one of the best ensemble pieces I have seen for a long time) to single out any individual, but I must make special mention of Michael Feast's Fagin. He was evil to the core and totally avoided what one might call the "Ron Moody effect" which invites us to sympathise with a character who is, essentially, far more evil than Bill Sykes, for Sykes is just a thug while Fagin is the source of great corruption. Against all my expectation, I thoroughly enjoyed the production and, for the first time for as long time, felt that here is a stage adaptation of a novel that really works.
|
||||||
|
|
