Stolidly traditional, Oliver! offers quality if not inspiration at Chichester Festival Theatre
“We don’t want to have no fuss”
The claim is made that this new production of Oliver! has been “fully reconceived especially for Chichester Festival Theatre” by director and choreographer Matthew Bourne and Cameron Mackintosh. My first thought is that whatever reconceived means here, there’s very little of the reinterpretation for which Bourne has been famed. The second would be that the direction shows a shocking lack of disregard for anyone sitting in the wings of this theatre, so thoroughly has this been blocked for the West End transfer it has already secured.
It’s a grumpier opener than I’d intended but it’s a show going in hard on the notion of ‘consider yourself one of the family’, Mackintosh and Bourne far too happy to stick a restricted view asterisk on that. And for all the evergreen brightness of so much of Lionel Bart’s score – you forget just how much stone cold classics are in here – there’s something a bit gross about the way that his free adaptation of Dickens’ novel has slipped into the classic canon in this day and age. Child poverty, criminality and domestic violence plus showtunes anyone?!
Without that promised sense of reinvigoration, this is a world of hee-hee haw-haw stereotypes – cruel gentlemen, pinched matrons and chirpy urchins galore. Three kids rotate Oliver but as sweet-voiced as tonight’s performer was, a painful staginess prevails over any real attempt to portray what this character has gone through. Similarly, Shanay Holmes’ unrevised Nancy just doesn’t (and shouldn’t) work for a contemporary audience – for me, being asked to accept ‘As Long As He Loves Me’ after being smacked around feels close to unacceptable.
What does work are the set pieces. Bourne’s choreographic grace overcomes the unwieldiness of Lez Brotherston’s revolve-heavy design to sweep the stage in the big ticket numbers like ‘Consider Yourself’ and ‘Who Will Buy’ (still one of my all-time favourite musical numbers). And in one of the production’s sole big wins, Simon Lipkin transforms Fagin into a swaggering Jack Sparrow type who does actually interrogate some of the problematic nature of the stereotypes the writing still indulges in. Commercially savvy to the end, you get all the oom-pah-pah Oliver! has ever had but contemporary audiences are well within their right to ask for more.
