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Oom-pah-pah! Plenty of that – with enough emphasis on Fagin as a surrogate papa to suggest a pun in this most boisterous of numbers. Oliver! is, after all, a show about families, lost, restored and invented. Yet there is also plenty of swirling darkness. The London fog and the rain that daggers down outside the workhouse. The song, cut from the 1968 film, delivered among coffins with Addams family glee. The sobbing anger, the desperate self-persuasion with which Shanay Holmes as Nancy delivers As Long As He Needs Me – immediately after Bill Sikes (a clenched Aaron Sidwell) has hit her.
Much of Matthew Bourne’s production, first seen last year at Chichester, is glorious: a celebration of the switchback swell of Lionel Bart’s music and lyrics; a proof of what a boon Bourne is to the stage. It is more than 30 years since he first choreographed Oliver! and staged the Swan Lake that revolutionised ballet and the way men think of themselves. He revisits both shows this year, with changes – minor but effective.
Nancy and Sikes are given a new scene, tumbled in bed, that suggests how she persuades herself she has something to lose. After Sikes kills her, he howls; bad, mad and sad: coercion takes more than one prisoner. Cian Eagle-Service, straight to the heart as the gruel-greedy orphan, puts across Where Is Love? not pathetically but with indignant sorrow. Family here is not only on stage: Consider Yourself reaches out to the audience, in a rare earned clap-along.
Superb lighting by Paule Constable and Ben Jacobs shows the action as if through Oliver’s eyes: a harsh glitter of grey over the workhouse; a deceptive golden glow for Fagin’s den. Lez Brotherston’s busy brown Victorian stock design is unsurprising but efficient. Movement, vocal and visual, is constant: urchins being thrown like parcels; solos blending into choruses. Oscar Conlon-Morrey is a magnificent Bumble – the “chubby hubby” whose voice shakes the stage; Billy Jenkins, as bendy in body as in morals, is lithe and blithe as the Artful Dodger, his jauntiness dipping only when Bill is referred to as his role model: the bad father.
And Fagin? Simon Lipkin is engulfing, commanding – barely sinister. Like a strolling player or a hippy magician, a multicoloured one-man band who waggles his mittened fingers as if they were puppets. Carried on wings of klezmer, he is a terrific pied piper, but in the second half lets his aim wander, targeting not his onstage companions (or himself) but the audience. The temperature dips. Until he goes off arm in arm with the Artful One. A discovered father. One of the family.
Bernard Shaw claimed that he wrote The Devil’s Disciple as a skit on 19th-century melodrama. Foiled again, Shaw. In director Mark Giesser’s nifty reworking, the play does not look theatrically in-turning. On the contrary: it feels alive in the world and politically astute. The paradoxical Shaw would have approved.
Giesser transplants the drama from 1777 to 1899, twists its title to The Devil May Care, and brushes off the dialogue. Different political movements and recent barbarities – the independence of India, waterboarding – are mentioned. Shaw’s heavy hint at a character’s nature by calling her Dudgeon is changed. Yet the central areas of contention – fights against colonisation in the home and abroad – are the same. As is the nature of the talk: continually twisting, dextrous argument. At times this taunts the audience – catch me if you can – or perversely trips up expectation. Sometimes it is a triumph of rationality over sloppy thinking.
The chap who prides himself amid the holies of being the devil’s disciple is beautifully performed by Callum Woodhouse. Amiably anarchic, spilling over with nonchalant insolence, he is the unprincipled person who behaves better than anyone else; an egotist who negates himself. He has strong support from Beth Burrows: a real Shavian woman, cleverer than most of the men but not allowed to seem so, who begins quivering with righteous compassion and ends by being shaken into feeling.
Rough around the edges, yet impressive, whisking around so much matter on a tiny stage, this might not quite land one of Shaw’s points but does suggest it: he wanted men to be “kind in cold blood. Anybody can be kind in emotional moments.”
One of the biggest stories of the past few days is not a show but a theatre. Michael Sheen announced the formation of the Welsh National Theatre, financed by the actor himself. It is good news: a fresh start, with Welsh writing and performers at the core. It is bad news: this is a response to the collapse of the National Theatre Wales, which lost Arts Council of Wales funding last year. As he sets up the first productions, due next year, Sheen has Laurence Olivier’s National in mind. And the actor himself. He has just bought at auction the prosthetic nose that perched on Olivier’s face in Richard III.
Star ratings (out of five)
Oliver! ★★★★
The Devil May Care ★★★
