Entertainment :: Theatre
Charles Dickens’ "Oliver Twist"
by Kilian Melloy Friday Feb 23, 2007 The ART’s fresh production of Oliver Twist is an energetic affair, full of brisk stagecraft and sleights-of-hand that preserve the Charles Dickens novel by using Dickens’ own prose to tell the tale, while keeping the play’s length to a trim and vital two and a half hours. Given last year’s film version by Roman Polanski, the iconic status of the musical movie Oliver!, and the enduring popularity of the novel - orgininally published in serial installments in newspapers - can there be anyone not acquainted at least with the bare bones of the story? Just in case, here’s a thumbnail sketch. An orphaned baby named Oliver Twist is shunted by uncaring Church laity to an orphange and workhouse, where, at age ten, he sends a shudder of revulsion through the grim-faced ranks of the legal and clerical hierarchy by asking for more porridge at dinner. This leads to his sale as an apprentice to an undertaker who treats him little better than the family dog (indeed, he’s fed leavings meant for the dog - and grudgingly at that). Oliver runs away to seek his fortune in London, and is immediately recruited into a gang of pick-pockets led by a ghastly exploiter named Fagin who - despite his wickedness, and strictly out of self interest - is a more concerned provider for the boys in his illicit charge than any official functionary. But a chance encounter unknowingly reunites Twist with his grandfather for a brief time - until, that is, Fagin contrives to steal the boy back. It’s a matter of life and death (and not just for Oliver) as to how, and whether, the boy will be returned to his family, or doomed to a life of crime. The story is kept intact for this adaptation by dint of careful editing and imaginative compression. Using a set design by Rae Smith that is deceptive in its simplicity (the set looks like a big crate, scuffed and marked with the painted impressions of boot-prints all over the walls and ceiling) but fully loaded with street signs, banners, and enlargements of news items that pop out or glide down at perfectly timed intervals, the production is unapologetically a work of theater, and sticks to theatrical traditions and techniques with a certain sense of pride and a buzzing, soaring energy. Struan Leslie’s "movement direction" pays off, meticulously dovetailing with Neil Bartlett’s keenly conceived, whip-tight direction. Dickens wrote with a sense of wry sorrow and moral outrage; the textual adaptation, also undertaken by director Bartlett, transplants that emotional tone without neglecting the filigree of transgressive glee that Dickens also employed for skewering the cruel and hollow moralistic stance of Church, state, and social mores in the Victorian era, when social Darwinism combined with a rigid skin-deep piety to morally abrasive effect. Hence the famously satirical (if not necessarily lyrical) names of the characters: Mr. Bumble, Mr. Sowerberry, Mr. Fang. To reflect that social mindset, the "proper" citizens of London are often dressed glumly by costume designer Rae Smith and costumer Penelope Challen, who wardrobe judges, Church officials, and other authority figures in black and grey, while the cut-purses and ruffians with whom Oliver finds shelter are given to dazzling touches of color and flash. (Only kindly Mr. Brownlow and his daughter [Will LeBow and Elizabeth Jasicki] are able to combine social status with a touch of color.) To be sure, in literature of all sorts it’s the wicked and the corrupting who are more colorful in every way. Dante’s Inferno may plunge its denizens into a deep freeze more often than torment them with flames, but the images and narrative friction that Hell’s mise-en-scene provide the poet sustains an emotional heat lacking from the Purgatorio or the Paradiso; and who hasn’t got more than a touch of sympathy for the devil when reading the marvelous speeches Milton gave Satan in Paradise Lost? Bartlett’s adaptation honors this classical inversion, this celebration of the corrupt. If there’s a figure from the novel more well known than Oliver Twist, it’s The Artful Dodger (Carson Elrod), the informal big brother who looks after Oliver in the big city by leading him to Fagin’s lair; Bartlett gives The Artful Dodger a particular place of pride in this stage version, casting the same actor as a narrator who heads up a clutch of ART Company regulars, a little knot of players who deliver plot-accelerating exposition - again, Dickens’ own prose, straight from the novel - in musical style, like a cross between a Greek Chorus and a band of Christmas Carolers. (Don’t worry: while there is a boy for sale, there’s no song about it as in the musical Oliver!. Nor are there any musical numbers as such.) Fagin himself is extravagantly plumed with twin strains of tenderness for his youthful charges - a gang of pickpockets he deploys into the streets of London to gather treasure from the unwary - and an utterly ruthless streak of hard, brute pragmatism. As played by Ned Eisenberg, Fagin is the vibrating string that brings the ensemble into focus and makes the play’s entire structure resonate; in Fagin’s character, and in Eisenberg’s adept, sterling performance, the kernel of Dickens’ argument can be found: it is industry without compassion or concern in which the moral hazard for despotism and sadistic disregard can be found. Fagin may be a lowlife, but he embodies whole the thoughtless machineries of victimization that characterize the penal system, the workhouse, and the era’s version of "faith based" solutions to street-level miseries, a ministry that - as Dickens points out - worked to increase suffering while adding a healthy dollop of righteous accusation into the mix. Then there’s Bill Sikes, whom Gregory Derelian plays with bullish, and bullying, swagger. (Derelian also plays the part of an unshaven and towering Mrs. Sowerberry with equal relish, a choice bit of casting that throws the good woman’s flinty miserliness into stark relief; member of the fairer sex or not, the Missus is every bit the violent alpha male that Bill Sikes is.) Sikes sports a blood-red waistcoat, and it suits him. Given to a casual attitude toward crime and the infliction of bodily harm, Sikes is the inevitable big, bad beast who marks Oliver out not simply for exploitation, but for pulverizing: all he needs is half an excuse to annihilate the kid. Oliver’s one true ally amongst this mob is Sikes’ girlfriend, Nancy (a spirited Jennifer Ikeda). Nancy’s profession is only delicately referred to, and she has less a heart of gold than an overriding maternal attachment to young Master Twist, but all the same she serves the plot in a traditional mother / whore role, sticking her neck out to save Oliver - with the narratively necessary outcome: Sikes, enraged at her betrayal, murders Nancy in a manner that, while not shown, we understand to be so savage that it electrifies the city and rouses the citizens of London to a vigilante fever. Throughout the play, the ART cast act as stagehands, setting up props and furnishings for quick changes of scenery; when six cast members carry Nancy in on her bed in the manner of pallbearers, it sends a thrill through the audience. We know what’s coming, of course, but the sheer grandeur of this bit of foreshadowing elicits admiration and, by indicating a funereal grief, lends poignancy to Nancy’s courage and sacrifice. Other roles may have been pared down from the source material, but they are rendered here with such verve that they still make an impression. Remo Airaldi brings his trademark blend of haplessness and chagrin to the role of Mr. Bumble, the workhouse administrator; Karen MacDonald is downright regal as Mrs. Bumble, a venal woman who conceals crucial evidence about Oliver’s origins out of greed. With just a few lines of dialogue, each of these longtime ART actors enrich scenes and emit bright sparks of humor. Thomas Derrah throws himself into three small roles, as Mr. Sowerberry, Mr. Grimwig the dotty Judge, and Mr. Fang, a skeptical friend of the fretful Mr. Brownlow who, along with Brownlow, is granted some colorful costuming: in this case, a glaring yellow vest that underscores Mr. Fang’s class-bound conviction that young Oliver will turn out to be a thug, and if not, "I’ll eat my head!" Oliver Twist himself, portrayed with an irresistible mixture of vulnerability and determination by Michael Wartella, is the one character who is allowed to be defined according to what others wish for him - or in contradiction to those wishes - rather than through his own assertion. We know at once that he is the hero of the piece; he’s got the gumption (or at least the desperation of hunger) that it takes to stand up and issue his shocking, indicting plea for more oatmeal while an inmate at the workhouse, where Twist is clad (as he constantly is) in white: a dirty-snow shade of white, in contrast to the blinding Little Lord Fauntleroy garments that he’s issued later on by Mr. Brownlow, but the grimy smudges on his clothing reflect only a material poverty, not a lack of inner resource. The narrator documents for us the great vitality of Twist’s spirit; the lad has the sense and the strength to escape his tenure as a slave to Mr. Sowerberry, and walk the 70 miles to London; he has the scrap in him to defend his mother’s honor against the cowardly Tom Chitling (Steven Boyer), who picks on Oliver only out of a mistaken notion about the boy’s lack of fortitude, and gets walloped for it. And yet, in his surprisingly limited dialogue, and in most of his actions, Oliver is shown shivering, trembling, and pleading; it’s as much his relative silence and his singular intent on escape from dangerous straits that informs his character as it is the accusations thrown at him - always by those who wish to starve, terrorize, or criminalize him - that Twist is "naughty" and "ungrateful." In his white, slight incarnation here, Twist seems a wisp dodging artfully around the wills of others; he stands out as much for his lack of malice as for his relative absence from what is, after all, his own story, and yet he defies the definitions that his social status presses onto him. Twist’s native wish to be allowed home and family - and to be allowed to grow up into a good man - would seem to be the moral of the story. His resistance to the oppression of society and the corruption of the criminal subculture offset Dicken’s observation, in the text of the novel and the play alike, that there is an ingrained tendency in human beings to pursue and hunt down quarry - even our own young. What Bartlett and the ART cast bring out here - with zesty staging that keeps to an upbeat tempo of word and gesture - is the equally deep-seated tendency to want to be good and upstanding, if one is simply allowed the chance. Run time: two hours, fifteen minutes, with one fifteen-minute intermission. Playing February 17 - March 24 at the ART’s Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Cambridge. Breakfast at the A.R.T. February 28: reception, talk, and morning performance - call 617.496.2000 x8844. Performance tickets: $15 for students (valid I.D. required); $53 - $76 for Friday and Saturday evening performances, depending on seating; weekend matinees and Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday Evenings, $38 - $66. Discounted tickets for Saturday matinees. Group rates also available - call 617.496.2000 x8844. Regular ticketing service is from the Box Office or call 617-547-8300. Fax: 617-495-1705. Email: info@amrep.org Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor. |
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