In an era where even Andrew Lloyd Webber has concluded he needs to move with the times, West End super producer Cameron Mackintosh remains obstinately grounded in the twentieth century. That’s not to say the man’s a dinosaur: he’s the UK producer of Hamilton, for starters. But he has a core of shows that have been in his stable for decades, that he returns to semi-frequently and sometimes claims to be reinventing. Really, though, the new takes on Miss Saigon, or Mary Poppins, or Les Mis are the equivalent of giving an old trophy a good buff and polish – you might make it sparkle a bit more, but it’s the same trophy.
Mackintosh was not the first producer of Lionel Bart’s all-singing Charles Dickens smash Oliver! – he was 13 when it opened – but he did produce a 1977 revival that was totally faithful to the original 1960 incarnation, down to using the same sets. He revived it once again in the ’80s, then did a new version in 1994, which was brought back in 2008. Now we have a ‘fully reconceived’ take from two old Oliver! hands: Mackintosh and director Matthew Bourne, the choreographer on the last incarnation.
Bourne is best known for sexy gothic dance pieces, and he certainly brings his full gothic sexiness to bear here: a cumulonimbus-worth of dry ice seeps through the inky recesses of Lez Brotherston’s brooding multilevel Victorian London sets. Sweeney Todd’s barbers could plausibly be just ariound the corner. Bourne’s choreography is not very ostentatious, but there are a few moments of stylised weirdness that perhaps hint at what Oliver! might have been like if directed more like his dance shows.
It’s solid. The songs remain a remarkable achievement – the likes of Food, Glorious Food and Consider Yourself are so unreasonably fresh and infernally hummable that it doesn’t compute that they predate the Beatles. If it would be a stretch to say Bart channels everything Dickens was trying to say about class, wealth and societal inequality, he at leqst does an impressive job of telescoping the sprawling plot of Oliver Twist into two-and-a-half hours.
Apart from ‘let’s add fucktonnes of dry ice’, the main point of reconception is presumably supposed to be Simon Lipkin as Fagin, the head of the gang of pickpockets that young orphan Oliver falls in with. Historically a somewhat problematic figure due to his abundant collection of antisemitic tropes, the solution here appears to be to make him as cuddly as physically possible. Looking like Jack Sparrow’s more bookish cousin, Lipkin’s Fagin breaks the fourth wall, makes stand-up comic style quips, cosily acknowledges his Jewishness, and his hoarding of valuable trinkets feels more like a minor hobby than a dark obsession. Making him so nice he won’t offend anyone is certainly one idea, but it does further defang Dickens’s yarn.
The biggest flaw, though, is one that’s haunted the show for decades: Olivier himself is just pretty bland. I’m not going to single out the child actor who was on when I saw it, because I think the problem lies firstly with Bart and secondly with the direction. But our hero is a wide eyed, improbably well-spoken young man who travels through life with such monumental innocence that it’s never even clear here that he’s aware Fagin et al are criminals. It’s a demanding role to give a tween, but the amount resting on his small shoulders has always been a weakness of the show. And clearly it’s not something Mackintosh is desperately bothered about fixing. And why would he? Now booking until next March, the West End’s mos successful producer has a hit on his hands with Oliver! Again.
