If Lionel Bart were composing Oliver! today, he’d almost certainly be persuaded to revise the content for fear of causing offence. Would any potential backer condone such cheery depictions of child abuse, lurid anti-semitic caricature or stand-by-your-man avowals of fidelity to a violent partner? Even the tavern where the rousing chorus of Oom-Pah-Pah occurs is called the Three Cripples.
The director of the Curve’s new production, Paul Kerryson, addresses these issues largely by ignoring them. Oliver! will always be redeemed by its surfeit of tunes, glorious tunes. That Bart never quite managed to equal the impact of the piece is perhaps no great surprise, given that he had more than enough hit numbers to sustain a whole career, but squandered them by placing them end-to-end within this same show.
Kerryson’s fluid staging is enhanced by athletic, barrel-jumping choreography from Andrew Wright and an impressively mobile design by Matt Kinley in which the imposing wooden modules representing Fagin’s den open out to reveal the doll’s house prettiness of Brownlow’s bourgeois world. The performances are uniformly impressive: Peter Polycarpou’s white-haired Fagin waddles around like a disreputable, elderly sea lion; Cat Simmons’ response to her rough handling by Oliver Boots’s surly Bill Sikes is to unleash an impassioned rendition of As Long As He Still Needs Me; and when he persists, to sing it again even louder.
The younger cast members alternate, though at this performance Albert Hart was a cherubic Oliver; and if Kwame Kandekore’s Dodger is not a star in the making I’ll eat his top hat. Which just leaves the animals – though the fearsome mastiff playing Bullseye rather disgraced himself by barking loudly through his master’s big number before sticking his snout up a doxy’s skirt. While I’m quite persuaded that this is how attack dogs behaved in Victorian London, it rather underlines the point that Bart’s fantasy world has little place for verisimilitude.
- At Curve, Leicester until 23 January 2016. Box office: 0116-242 3595.
