ARTicles vol. 5 i.3b: Staging a New Stage Version of Oliver Twist

Any new stage version of a story which the audience feels they not only know but own before the curtain even rises has to do two apparently contradictory things. It has to deliver all the famous bits (so that no one feels short-changed), but also has to make the audience feel that they are encountering the story anew, afresh; that they are hearing and seeing things which they either never knew or had forgotten were there. The first decision taken in making this adaptation was that it would be made out of Dickens’ original language and nothing but. With the exception of one or two short phrases necessitated by the telescoping of the novel’s plot, this is a decision which has been abided by. Indeed, the extraordinary energy and volatility, the sadistic black comedy and sheer dramatic guts of Dickens’ actual sentences are the raisons d’être of this piece. Returning to the original words — even for the singing in the show — was the main way in which I hoped to avoid any bowdlerization of the tale. I wanted the show to be as alarming, as compelling and as wickedly comic as Dickens’ words are. Of course, which words I have chosen to include, and which words I have chosen to omit, reveal what I personally care most about in this story. I hope. The Question of Tone ‘It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodrama, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon. The hero sinks upon his bed, weighed down by misfortune; the next scene regales the audience with comic song.’ –Oliver Twist, Chapter 17 What do we mean by the word ‘Dickensian’? Not, I think, simply subject matter taken from the lower depths of urban poverty. Rather, I think we mean a distinctive way of dramatizing what is seen. The first nineteenth-century stagings of Oliver Twist — some made even before the final parts of the original, serialized novel had been published — have scripts of quite extraordinary ferocity and brevity. One of them gets the whole proceedings down to thirty handwritten pages, and still finds time for plenty of rambling low comedy from the Bumbles. They all seek to unashamedly achieve one objective, namely, to rouse the audience. To achieve this end, they employ the most remarkable combinations of comedy with horror, satire with sentiment. They demand that the audience enjoys the most alarming leaps of dramatic tone. They are also very fond of (and good at) employing those most powerful forms of theatrical shorthand, the baldly stated moral, the tableau and the melodrama. In doing all of this they are of course entirely in keeping with Dickens’ own dramatic and dramatizing instincts in Oliver Twist. Dickens is, paradoxically, the most serious of writers, in that he takes this task of engaging us, his audience, with such wholehearted seriousness. I wanted to create an adaptation that would not shy away from this seriousness, but rather relish it; that would demand of its actors they engage with their audience above all else. This is why the script does not try to shift Dickens into some solid or polite middle ground of dialogue-based, psychologised ‘literary’ theatre, but lets his story move alarmingly (demandingly) through all its intensely felt and highly coloured original shifts of theatrical tone. It is only when melodrama is allowed to rub shoulders with psychodrama, when sensationalism combines with fierce and socially committed satire, that you arrive in the particular world of the dramatic imagination that we can only describe with the tautology ‘Dickensian.’ The Set ‘Sudden shiftings of scene, and rapid changes of time and place, are not only sanctioned in books, by long usage, but are by many considered a great art.’ –Oliver Twist, Chapter 17 The first visual and physical inspiration for our set was a visit to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds. This not only renewed my interest in the unheimlich appeal of waxworks, especially those depicting extreme violence, but also triggered in designer Rae Smith’s imagination a connection between the sensationalist mechanics of Dickens’ plot — its combination of creaky contrivance with uncanny power — with the mechanical toys which we now know as ‘Penny Dreadful’ machines. These are the sinister glass-fronted boxes which, in response to a child inserting the required coin, bring to life miniature tableaux of haunted houses, historic crimes or mildly erotic misdemeanours. One of these boxes, emptied and magnified, as if by a child’s imagination, provided the basic setting. The early nineteenth century theatrical vocabulary of fly-ropes, trapdoors, footlights and two-dimensional scenery also influenced the design of the show, allowing and indeed encouraging a script which cuts and dissolves from scene to scene without any establishing shots (to confuse matters by employing a cinematic vocabulary) — and, largely, without any narrative linking passages. The Music ‘The preliminaries adjusted, they proceeded with flourishes of most unmusical snatches of song, mingled with wild execrations.’ –Oliver Twist, Chapter 26 The popular theatre which Dickens knew and loved was almost all, in the original sense of the word, melodrama; an evening at the theatre without live music barely existed in the first half of the nineteenth century. This script, too, is a melodrama, in that the telling of the story presupposes that the actors work with (and sometimes against) music in their telling of that story, and the creation of the different places and atmospheres which that story takes us to. The music is all adapted from popular early nineteenthcentury music-hall numbers contemporary with the novel, and arranged for an authentic (if somewhat alarming) early Victorian combination of violin, serpent and hurdy-gurdy. The Plot ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’ –Miss Prism, The Importance of Being Earnest This is a story with a single over-riding desire; to find a family for its orphan hero. Every scene in the book can be read in this light; every character too. In the absence of Oliver’s mother, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry — even Noah Claypole and Charlotte — all attempt, in their various twisted ways, to mother him. Fagin and Mr. Brownlow, in their archetypically opposite worlds, construct surrogate families for Oliver. Everyone (even Mr. Grimwig) is convinced that they know the right way for the boy to live. All of these conflicting dreams of family life, so deeply rooted in their creator’s own childhood, are powerful; Nancy’s dream of a possible home for Oliver — her determination that he will have the childhood she knows has been stolen from her — is so fierce, that it kills her. In editing Dickens’ labyrinthine plot, I wanted to arrive at a script whose economy would encourage the actors to concentrate on trying to get back to the blunt realities of the original cast-list. Nancy is, after all, a teenage prostitute with a violent owner, not a musical-comedy star; the boys Fagin says he finds sleeping rough at Kings Cross are very like the teenagers who still sleep rough there; Bill is a violent housebreaker, and a coward; Fagin is Jewish, and his vicious rage is that of someone who lives excluded from everything we might conceivably call society. Some of the events of the great final working-out of the story may surprise audiences who only know it from films. I’ve kept what for me is the greatest and strangest scene of the book, where, on the night before his death, Fagin goes mad with terror, and in his madness realises that Oliver is ‘somehow the cause of all this.’ I’ve taken Mr. Brownlow and Rose seriously. I’ve dared to kill off not just Nancy and Bill, but Fagin and the Dodger, as Dickens does. I’ve even dared to believe, as Dickens did, that after all the strange violent parodies of family life that claim him — the brutal workhouse of the Bumbles, the gothic funeral-parlour of the Sowerberries, the nightmare inversion of all maternal values in Fagin’s den — the motherless Oliver’s destiny is the one we must all, despite our evidence to the contrary, believe in: safety.

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