Oliver! review

Lez Brotherston’s designs offer a murky London of steel gantries, pawnshops, pubs and coffee houses, bustling with picture-perfect denizens: self-important men with mutton chops, moustaches and stovepipe hats, and purse-lipped women in mob caps with formidable bosoms. Bourne’s buoyant, nimble choreography is wrapped around darker drama that makes its mark in broad strokes. Shanay Holmes’ sensual, heartbroken Nancy gives glorious voice to both her defiance and her agony, in a booze-soaked Oom-Pah-Pah as well as a shattering As Long As He Needs Me. And Aaron Sidwell brings a chilling touch of psychosis to his thuggish Bill Sikes; he embodies the possible destiny, troublingly, of Billy Jenkins’ tough-nut charmer the Artful Dodger if he continues in his criminal career.

Simon Lipkin’s Fagin, a rackety con man with a flair for theatrics, is a scene-stealer, his carapace of ruthlessness, hardened by decades of survival and self-preservation, occasionally cracking to allow some tenderness to seep out, as when he puts the bewildered Oliver to bed at his den’s fireside. Some of his vaudevillian embellishments – particularly in the panicked reckoning of Reviewing the Situation – are a distraction: gags that go for easy laughs when we’d rather engage more fully with Fagin’s dilemma. But it’s unarguably a hugely charismatic performance.

The supporting roles, though, are just as eye-catching, from Stephen Matthews and Jamie Birkett as sibilant, snake-like undertakers the Sowerberrys to Callum Hudson’s snot-nosed, sadistic bully Noah Claypole and Oscar Conlon-Morrey and Katy Secombe as the amoral, cheerfully venal overseers of the workhouse where Oliver makes his fateful supper-time plea for more. In fact, there’s not a slack moment in a show that delivers everything its fans will expect, with a flash of extra panache.