Review: OLIVER!, Chichester Festival Theatre

As one might say about pickpockets on the streets of Victorian London, you’re never far away from an Oliver! Just a few months after James Brining’s production had wowed the critics and public alike at Leeds Playhouse, Chichester Festival Theatre wheels out the big guns of Matthew Bourne (Director and Choreographer) and Lez Brotherston (Designer) to do the same for the people of the south of England. If you’re a fan of Lionel Bart’s beloved musical, it’s a fine life indeed just now.

From the leafy tranquility of the grounds outside the auditorium, we’re pitched straight into the bleakness of a 19th century workhouse and, the day after Parliament voted to retain the two child limit on Universal Credit, kids are pleading for “Food Glorious Food”. Not for the last time in the evening, Abba’s trick of wrapping melancholy with fabulously catchy tunes comes to mind.

Bart’s genius goes further than that. Stephen Sondheim once castigated his own lyrics for “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story saying that he had made a New York shopgirl, Maria, sound like a character in a Noel Coward play. The Eastender without formal musical education who could neither write nor read music never makes that mistake. The language is simple (barely a word above two syllables) and the tunes work on hook after hook, as one might expect from the man who wrote pop songs for Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. Amidst Charles Dickens’ sentimentality and shameless manipulation of our emotions, that unity of words and music provides a foundation in truth that sweeps us along and keeps any raised eyebrow firmly in place.

What a ride it is! After the cruelty of Mr Bumble (an operatic Oscar Conlon-Morrey, as preposterous as he is terrifying) hawking a “Boy For Sale” and the false kindness of funeral director Mr Sowerberry (Stephen Matthews channelling Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), Oliver is rescued by The Artful Dodger. 

Billy Jenkins may be a cookie-cutter Cockney sparrer, but the lad can dance, introducing (as one would expect from this director) a key element of the show that reaches its peak with the showstopping “Consider Yourself”, worth the ticket price on its own, masterpiece of technical virtuosity.

The classics keep coming. Cian Eagle-Service (one of three Olivers rotating through the run) lets his boy soprano voice soar in “Where Is Love?” and Simon Lipkin’s Fagin leads a raucous “You’ve Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two” showcasing a splendid ensemble of ragamuffins with talent to burn. The sentiment of “As Long As He Needs Me” may be a little outdated as Nancy acquiesces in the violence of Bill Sikes, but there’s no gainsaying Shanay Holmes’s belting of the show’s 11 o’clock number. 

As with all great art, Oliver! reveals different faces every time you see it. Lipkin plays up both the pathos of Fagin and, with a bit of fourth wall breaking, his comic potential too, but long before his late lament, “Reviewing The Situation” we have him clocked as a lonely man, at least as interested in the energy and company his group of ‘my dears’ bring into his life as in the fruits of their thieving. You also see his disappointment that his first surrogate son, Bill Sikes (a blank-eyed Aaron Sidwell) has become a withdrawn psychopath and that Dodger is growing up and will soon want a ‘business’ of his own. Oliver is his new would-be son, but age is creeping over the old jewellery fence and he knows he may be the last protege.

One also sees how fertile the ground is for recruiting to gangs (even today) amongst alienated, drifting youths blessed with ambition and moxie. The Alexander Hamilitons and Oliver Twists of today live with the poison of Andrew Tate dripping into their ears or seduced by the false sense of belonging county lines gang culture offers, a purpose and identity in a hostile, confusing world. Dickens has been popular for so long because he excavated universal human emotions.

That’s more for reflections for the journey home (and Oliver! never shies away from the hard edge of its source material). Before you do, you’ll be singing those unforgettable songs to yourself, reprising the spectacle of the dance routines in your mind’s eye and wondering whether it’s justifiable to rebook at this venue or for the Christmas run at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End. Yes, dare I say that you’ll “Be Back Soon?”        

Oliver! is at Chichester Festival Theatre until 7 September 

Photo images: Johan Persson

 

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