Oliver Twist (London & tour)

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 infectiously hummable songs, super-imposed ‘happy’ endings for several characters and general musical jollity – not to mention an exclamation point title! – Oliver Twist is revealed as the horrific tale it really is. That of a lonely orphan, “which nobody can’t love”, who is further used and abused when he falls in with a gang of London thieves. No lovable rogues, these are villains of the first order, hardened by poverty, graft and exclusion from a society that would as soon hang or transport them as acknowledge their lowly existence.

At the centre of this gang is the piece’s true villain. Not the violent Bill Sikes, but the cruelly manipulative and avaricious Fagin, played here by Michael Feast on astonishingly sinister top form. Through Bartlett’s interpretation and Feast’s powerfully nuanced performance, we see Fagin not as Bill’s frightened flunky but rather a much savvier adversary, fully aware of how to pull just the right strings.

This does pose a problem for Nicholas Asbury whose Sikes, by comparison, registers rather too low on the scale of fear and loathing. But elsewhere in a role-juggling 13-strong ensemble, there’s plenty to appreciate in the comic exchanges between Paul Hunter and Brigid Zengeni’s Mr and Mrs Bumble and Owen Sharpe’s very artful, mohawked Dodger who intermittently turns engaging narrator with a change in accent. And in the title role, Jordan Metcalfe captivates, bringing a terror-stricken and watchful ‘otherness’ to Oliver.

Rae Smith’s set is suitably underbelly dreary, with its many trapdoors, footlights and flats anchoring it in Victorian theatricality, but – a niggle – the Penny Dreadful-style box platform is raised rather high, especially for sore necks in the first few rows.

All in all, though, in terms of meeting those twin imperatives: Neil Bartlett, consider yourself successful.

– Terri Paddock