The Devil May Care

Oliver! (Gielgud Theatre, London) 

Verdict: Loud and overstated 

Reality doesn’t really belong in Lionel Bart’s joyous musical staging of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Far from being a work of social realism, his show is a glorious escape from the grim reality of the Victorian orphanages and criminal underworld where it’s set.

Thanks to a famously unbeatable roster of music hall tunes — from Food Glorious Food to Consider Yourself — it’s a big, beaming, toe-tapping lark.

That’s why I find it odd that Cameron Mackintosh’s much-feted revival (first seen in Chichester last year), directed by the choreographer Matthew Bourne, seems anxious to remind us that life below the poverty line in 19th-century London was no joke.

The domestic violence of the villain Bill Sikes is brutally emphasised, and a slogan overhead at Oliver’s orphanage sarcastically proclaims ‘God Is Love’.

But that’s not to say there’s no fun. Unsurprisingly, Bourne’s choreography runs like a Rolls-Royce. Oom-Pah-Pah after the interval is one of the most exuberant welcome-back songs ever written.

Thanks to a famously unbeatable roster of music hall tunes — from Food Glorious Food to Consider Yourself — it’s a big, beaming, toe-tapping lark

I find it odd that Cameron Mackintosh’s much-feted revival (first seen in Chichester last year), directed by the choreographer Matthew Bourne, seems anxious to remind us that life below the poverty line in 19th-century London was no joke

The show is, for a lot of the time, a proper Cockney knees-up, with the barrel well and truly rolled out in tunes like You’ve Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two and Be Back Soon

Where Bourne gives us spectacle and wallop, the show’s characters are more tentatively drawn

Bourne’s choreography runs like a Rolls-Royce. Oom-Pah-Pah after the interval is one of the most exuberant welcome-back songs ever written

I don’t want to be down on a show that’s enthusiastically staged on a busy revolve, beneath gangways and bridges wreathed in dry ice and laundry. But me and my moderator daughter were not blown away

And the show is, for a lot of the time, a proper Cockney knees-up, with the barrel well and truly rolled out in tunes like You’ve Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two and Be Back Soon.

But where Bourne gives us spectacle and wallop, the show’s characters are more tentatively drawn.

Far from being a wily creature, forced to live by his wits, Simon Lipkin’s pickpocket-in-chief Fagin is a strapping, stentorian drifter. Had he a mind to, he could surely make light work of Aaron Sidwell’s thuggish Bill Sikes.

Read More PATRICK MARMION reviews тιтanique at the Criterion Theatre in London

But at least Lipkin is also a warm-hearted father figure to his young apprentices.

And although Shanay Holmes could use more atтιтude as barmaid Nancy, she isn’t too downtrodden in her conflicted song for Bill, As Long As He Needs Me.

The most touching number falls to our hero Oliver in Where Is Love — despatched in the crystal tones of a choirboy by Cian Eagle-Service in the performance I saw.

I don’t want to be down on a show that’s enthusiastically staged on a busy revolve, beneath gangways and bridges wreathed in dry ice and laundry. But me and my moderator daughter were not blown away. Too much feels too loud and over-stated.

Even Oliver’s famous request for more gruel seems over-played. I wanted a bit less of everything — except, of course, Bart’s raucous, reality-defying fantasy.

 

The Devil May Care

(Southwark Playhouse, London)

Verdict: Thriller in Manila 

Fans, like me, of Channel 5’s All Creatures Great And Small will be eager to know that they can catch ladies man Tristan Farnon (Callum Woodhouse, right) up close and personal at the bijou Southwark Playhouse. He stars as a deracinated playboy and former gun-runner in The Devil May Care — an amusing adaptation of an early George Bernard Shaw comedy. Writer-director Mark Giesser has relocated the action from revolutionary America circa 1780 to the Philippines circa 1900, where US colonial forces are violently squashing local insurrections.

Woodhouse’s character Richard is a prodigal son who’s become the beneficiary of his father’s will — despite displeasing his mother by leading a life ‘among shiftless men and open-minded women’.

Giesser turns Shaw’s satire of colonial hypocrisy into a courtroom thriller in Manila after Richard beggars belief by standing in for a vicar accused of spreading sedition among the natives.

His decision is a rhetorical device typical of Shaw, but it also cues wry and witty discussion of personal, religious, political, colonial and military ethics.

Theatre production The Devil May Care, Southwark

It’s not the most sophisticated production, in front of a wall of Rousseau-ish jungle paintings and bric-a-brac furniture. But there’s sharp acting, too

A playful presence on stage and screen, Woodhouse is somehow believable as the implausible chancer Richard, mobilising duplicity, audacity and charm.

It’s not the most sophisticated production, in front of a wall of Rousseau-ish jungle paintings and bric-a-brac furniture. But there’s sharp acting, too, from Beth Burrows as the vicar’s wife who — in another Shavian twist — turns out to be a brilliant barrister.

*Oliver! is booking until September 28. The Devil May Care runs until February 1.

 

Revival of murderous maids play lacks polish 

The Maids (Jermyn Street Theatre, London) 

Verdict: Impotent power play

The real-life battering to death in the 1930s of a mother and daughter by their two servants, the Papin sisters, became a cause célèbre — and the inspiration of Jean Genet’s 1947 ‘absurdist’ play The Maids, a radical psychological study of class, power and revenge.

The Maids at Jermyn Street Theatre

The Maids is a radical psychological study of class, power and revenge

Which may explain why the set for Annie Kershaw’s revival has the feel of a clinical, soulless cell in a psychiatric hospital. The white-tiled room is bare but for a dressing table, a digital clock and vases of ᴅᴇᴀᴅ brown flowers.

‘You stink of sweat,’ says a young woman in a silk dressing-gown, sniffing the meek, cowering housemaid. ‘To touch you is to touch filth,’ she spits. ‘You owe your entire existence to me.’

Her tone of haughty disgust doesn’t quite ring true. Then she stumbles over the maid’s name and it becomes clear that these sisters are playing a game — of sorts.

While their mistress is out, they take it in turns to act as the abusive employer and the abused servant. Evidently as obsessed with this woman’s superiority and otherness as well the inequity of their situation, they slip between being enslaved and fantasising about putting a stop to it all… by poisoning her camomile tea.

But just as the fantasy looks like it might become a murderous reality, the game is cut short by her unexpected return. Carla Harrison-Hodge plays the Mistress as a prancing parody from the likes of Made In Chelsea: too preposterous to be alarming, too vain and vacuous to see anything beyond her own deluded reflection of herself.

*The Maids runs in London until January 22, then moves to Reading Rep 

Anna Popplewell and Charlie Oscardo well to suggest the crushed, conflicted minds of the maids but, competent asthis production is, it lacks an essential nervy intensity.

I blame Martin Crimp’s inert shapeless adaptation, which fails to find the play’s dramatic heartbeat. A landmark play loses its potency.

*The Maids runs in London until January 22, then moves to Reading Rep (January 28-February 8).

 

Cirque’s Scary Spectacle Is Still Flying High

Corteo (Royal Albert Hall)

Verdict: Delightfully daunting

What kind of anxiety dreams must these guys have, I began to wonder, during the latest residency of Cirque Du Soleil at the Albert Hall.

By coincidence, their new show is framed as the enchanting dream of an Italian clown, Mauro, imagining his carnivalesque funeral and journey into the afterlife.

The Albert Hall is bisected by a fin-de-siècle ballroom, which turns the audience on either side into part of the opulent scenery. We become part of the action, too, when a tiny ‘clowness’ bounces over us, supported by huge helium balloons.

While angels waft over the stage, the clown’s journey to eternity is, nonetheless, the familiar procession of acrobats and contortionists.

But the formula feels fresher, as trapeze artists get tangled in chandeliers over Mauro’s bed, and trampoliners bounce off his mattress.

Ultimately, no narrative gimmick or quanтιтy of glitzy costumes can disguise what is a high-risk gymnastic display — including the heartstopping moment one man ascends a freestanding 12ft ladder.

There is the usual goofy comedy; a nervous ‘golf ball’ (a woman’s head, in white dimpled swimming cap, sticking through a hole in the stage) waits while a bumbling giant in plus fours swings a club.

But then it’s back to defying gravity. The show climaxes with a dozen men on horizontal bars. Outwardly they are cool as zucchini. But what dreams must come, when they shuffle home to bed?

*Until March 2.