Review: FAGIN'S LAST HOUR, White Bear Theatre

A man, dressed in rags, feet bare, grubby beyond description, wakes with a start, eyes instantly mad, shouting, wailing, fearful. It is Fagin, in his cell, the last hour of his life commencing, the Newgate gallows a mere key turn away. He tells us how he ended up in such a state.

Charles Dickens was so concerned about adding Sikes and Nancy to his reading tours that he felt he had first to trial it and, only when he was so assured that the fainting and tears could be contained, did he put it in his repertoire. Based on a true life murder, this scene is all Oliver Reed menace and very little Ron Moody charm - we're a long way from Lionel Bart, even more so as James Hyland tells it from the condemned man's viewpoint - there is no omniscient narrator to provide a little distance, just us and the man who may not have held the weapon, but sure as hell inspired the deed.

Hyland plays (or rather, adopts) the other characters too. Of course, we get the miser who ran his child thieves through London's East End, picking a pocket or two, but Hyland also gives us an Artful Dodger, puffed up on wise-before-his-time bravado and Oliver, the new kid with a lot to learn. We get Fagin's enforcer, the psychotic Sikes and even a glimpse of Bullseye, his no less psychotic dog. And Nancy, the good time girl whose life is anything but a good time, who attempts to deliver Oliver from a life of misery and only meets her own end as a consequence.

It's grim, it's intense and it's a release when when we, as incarcerated as Fagin in our black box space, can breathe air less fetid with the stench of Victorian misery. That, of course, is a testament to Hyland's fidelity to the source material, as Dickens, capable of writing light with equal facility to shade, was at his darkest here, forcing the people to look upon the consequences visited on the orphan Twist and the morals and behaviours of those into whose circles he gravitated. "This is what you have made" is his admonishment - not for the first time, nor the last.

Hyland has a well deserved reputation for performing one man shows like this to the highest of standards and this production is no exception. That said, maybe it's just bad timing, but the show's very authenticity works against it in yet another week of dispiriting news about men's violence towards women - have we made any progress in the last 185 years?

Fagin's Last Hour is at the White Bear Theatre until 22 January

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