Oliver Twist

Synopsis

Classic story of crime, poverty, vice and a young innocent orphan in London. Some of the most celebrated villains in English literature (Artful Dodger, Bill Sykes, Fagin).

Our Review:

26 February 2004

Director and adapter Neil Bartlett hasn’t set himself an easy task with Oliver Twist. As he points out himself in the playtext notes, this is a story which the audience feels “they not only know but own”. That holds especially true with a theatre audience, whose proprietorship owes as much – if not more – to Lionel Bart’s hit musical Oliver! (on both stage and screen) as to familiarity with Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel.

And so to Bartlett’s “twin imperatives” for a new version: first, give the audience the famous bits they want and expect so they don’t feel cheated, and, at the same time, make them feel like they’re discovering it all anew. To achieve this apparent paradox, Bartlett has returned to the source, incorporating Dickens’ words – and only Dickens’ words – throughout, even for the occasional singing, which is accompanied by discordant performer-played music. All very non Bart-esque.

In fact, stripped bare of Bart’s inf...

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Latest User Review

jwd.london - 15 January 2009:

!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME! !SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME! !SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME! Andre Lloyd Webber raped a classic,the ONLY classic British Musical, last night and left her cut, bruised and bleeding in the gutter of stage on Drury Lane last night. It is now clear to me that the ruthless British Theatre Conglomerate, THE REALLY USEFFUL THEATRE COMPANY, cares more about the bums on seats, then the music to our ears. The musical genre started and flourished in America. Admittedly we created the world's best loved musical:MAMA MIA and Phantom of the Opera" - YES WE DID! Is that anything to take pride in? We constantly sneer at the Starbuckification and MacDonaldification that the yanks have empossed on US and the World. THEY did not take a bunch of excellent Abba tunes and glue them onto a non existant story line. I admit that Mamma Mia had me singing along and dancing in the aisles; my local karoke pup night, howver has the same effect. Even Lord Webber would not, I'd suggest, want to birng the Dirty Ducks Sing-a-Long into the West End. Rae Smith should be ashamed for her designs for OLIVER! They are derivative - there is nothing that could not have been seen in the original early 1960s version of this amazingly poignant, funny and relavant Dickensian credit-crunch musical extravaganza. For years people have been saying: "I love Oliver!, shame what they did to it in the movie - the look, the clothes, the accents, the bawdy humour is right out of a Carry-on film" I would have prefered an IMAX version of the Oliver! film to anything I saw on the Drury Lane stage last night. The film Oliver!is very dated:1970s. This stage Oliver! is even more dated and stilted: 1960s. !SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME! !SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME! !SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!SHAME!...

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