“You went to see Oliver!” said my mum, “that’s one of my favorites … ”
She didn’t need to say anything else. I knew from that look of hurt and accusation that my omission had put me in bad offspring territory. Least favorite son even. And I’m the only son and heir. I could almost see her mentally crossing me off her Christmas card list.
“It’s on till December the eighth, mum. I’m sure there’s time … ”
“Don’t worry, Philip; just so long as YOU enjoyed it.”
“Enjoy it! It was fabulous, you would have absolutely loved it.”
Most likely it would have been best to leave it at that. Make some comment about my sister’s new boyfriend or enquire as to the complex and continuing health problems of the neighbour’s Airedale Terrier, Angus – suffers terribly with his nerves, poor mutt, prone to an anxious bladder and always losing great swatches of body hair – anything to distract her. Instead, I gave her the benefit of my considered opinion. Extensively.
Of course, I began, the plot’s entirely far fetched. Oliver’s abandoned to institutional care as a baby in the Midlands where for the first decade or so of his life he is maltreated, malnourished and maligned. He’s pretty much sold into slavery after he has the temerity to ask for a second helping of gruel, and nothing much improves in life except he gets to sleep in a coffin. When he manages to escape and make it to London he finds that opportunities for a kid with no education, zero connections and few transferable skills are fairly limited, so he ends up groomed as a pickpocket and petty thief. This seems like a positive step up the ladder given what he’s been through. Eventually he is reunited with his morally impeccable and financially secure grandfather, reassuming the elevated social class cruelly denied him by circumstances but guaranteed him by destiny. Oliver survives with his spirit unbroken, his soul unblemished, and his accent decidedly more plummy than brummy. Complete escapist fantasy. I mean, Oliver ought to be talking like Ozzy Osborne, not Boris Johnson.
And the characters are scarcely more than one-dimensional. Oliver himself is a bit of a drip, considering (oh I know he’s only a kid, and an orphan at that, but I can’t be the only one who finds him completely irritating, can I?) Dodger’s a geezer, Fagin is a rather unpalatable stereotype of something we’d prefer not to talk about, Nancy a whore with a heart, and Bill Sikes is just “Bill Sikes”, a name that comes with guaranteed brand recognition, if the brand you’re building is for something you’d really not like to bump into down a dark alley after an evening in The Three Cripples.
Despite all that, and I don’t know how, Lionel bart managed to make a great musical out of Oliver.
It’s not just that every song is terrific – even the lesser known ones like That’s Your Funeral have perfect lines (“We’re here to glamourize you for that Endless Sleep, You may as well look fetching When you’re six foot deep”) which make me laugh every time – but the songs also celebrate something you don’t often see on stage; the lower classes having fun.
Oliver doesn’t flinch from showing the horrors of existence at the bottom of the social pile, but there’s also the exuberance and wit and companionship and sheer bloody-minded determination to enjoy the “small pleasures”, which often gets ignored or, worse, ridiculed, in more run of the mill theatre. You don’t get it much better expressed than in “Consider Yourself”
Nobody tries to be lah-di-dah and uppity.
There a cup o’tea for all.
Only it’s wise to be handy wiv’ a rolling pin
When the landlord comes to call!
The Cameron Mackintosh production at the Leeds Grand is about as good as it gets. Neil Morrissey plays a more humourous Fagin than I’ve seen – there was even a Bob the Builder joke smuggled in, I wonder if there was a bet on that? – and Samantha Barks was terrific as Nancy, belting out the raunchy Oom Pah Pah, and equally at home with the tear-jerker As He Needs Me. The kids were great too, all of them.
It’s not something that I generally remark on – or notice, to be fair – but even I was awed by the sets. In fact at one point I must have spent five minutes musing on how exactly the engineering of a particular set change had worked, going seemlessly from Fagin’s stuffy, cramped, underlit den into a spacious sunlit street in fashionable London, it looked incredibly complicated.
Anyway, I have to report that even my mum sounded impressed. I’ve promised to take her soon. I’d take dad too but there’s a major deficiency in motorized mayhem for his tastes. Perhaps if we could update the script and have a Bill Sikes car chase next year? There’s a whole new demographic. Hope you’re listening Leeds Grand Theatre.
Oliver runs until 8th December. Tickets are limited from the Leeds Grand Theatre Box Office