An Intoxicating Combination

Steeped in the lexicon of old English theatrical forms such as melodrama (we're treated to both a hanging and a murder, both delivered with cartoonish aplomb) and pantomime (down to the cross-dressing and repetition of stock phrases like "oh yes she did!") this dirty finger-nailed firecracker of a production creates something both dramatically vivid and politically engaging out of its source material. From the smudged contours of the claustrophobic funhouse set, with its stained, yellowing walls covered with black boot prints and multiple trapdoors, to the scratchy, live musical accompaniment provided by a trio of wandering troubadours playing out-of-tune folk music instruments (hurdy gurdy, fiddle, and serpent), Bartlett's production coats Dickens' social critique about child poverty and the hypocrisy of the ruling classes with an extra thick layer of soot.

Like a trip to San Francisco's Musée Mecanique, the play transports us to another time and place of magical contraptions and sideshow freaks. The ensemble tells us at the start of the show: "To be sure, it is a work of fiction; an impossibility, an anomaly, an apparent contradiction." But because this is Bartlett's rather than Lionel Bart's saccharine version of the story (the 1960 musical Oliver!), we are not fooled for one second. Just as many of the hems at the bottom of the actors' costumes are coated with an inch of mud, so we understand that the problems Dickens exposed in his novel are not remotely made up or a feature of our distant pasts.

It is this mixing of a richly strange theatrical imagination and an ability to make Dickens, Poussin, or whatever the source material might be resonate with the preoccupations of our own time that defines Bartlett's greatness. The marriage of theatricality and a social conscience is a hallmark of Dickens' work, too, so it's no wonder that the combination of these two artists' talents should be so intoxicating. Oliver Twist marks the second Bartlett-Dickens collaboration to date (the first was an ingenious production of A Christmas Carol in 2003.) I hope we haven't seen the last of the partnership. Please, sir, I want some more.