New "Oliver Twist" Plays Takes Searing Look at London’s Criminal Class in the 1830s

Oliver Twist
Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey
Drew University
Madison, N.J.

Ten-year-old Oliver Twist, an orphan stuck toiling in a roughly run British workhouse in the 1830s, walked up to his supervisor with an empty bowl of gruel after lunch and pleaded, “Please sir, can I have some more?” The unheard-of demand for a decent meal in the horrid workhouse created a storm of trouble among the other boys incarcerated there and the crude staff.

With the legendary demand, the latest stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s scalding novel Oliver Twist was off and running at the regional Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey, where it opened on Saturday. This majestic new version of the play, adapted by Neil Bartlett and based on Dickens book, with quite a bit of Oliver!, the 1968 musical adaptation thrown in for good measure, casts a troubled eye on labor conditions in British workhouses for boys in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Like many of Dickens's novels, the story begins at the main character's birth. (The opening chapter of David Copperfield, "I Am Born," is probably the most famous.) Oliver Twist is born to an unwed mother and raised with funds provided by Britain’s Poor Law. When he's old enough, he's put to work in a grimy workhouse where he lives with rats. When he reaches ten years of age, he's sent to live and work with a local undertaker, after which, in the face of cruelty and beatings, he flees to London and falls in with the famous pickpocket gang run by the criminal Fagin, who provides room and board for his underage hooligans. In Fagin’s overcrowded, crumbling headquarters, Oliver is befriended by the Nancy, the gutsy tavern wench with the heart of gold, girlfriend of tough guy Bill Sikes, who is always dressed in black.

Oliver is unfairly charged with stealing. The boy, sickly at the time, is not jailed, but instead brought home by the wealthy man who was the target of Oliver’s teenage cronies. There, with his loving care, and that of his daughter and a doctor, Oliver recovers. He is sent to return books to a store in London and is kidnapped by kids in Fagin’s gang and sent back to a life of crime, toiling for a week with Bill Sikes robbing stores and people from one end of London to another, all against his will.

Everything seems helpless until there is a turn in events and all ends well for the lovable Oliver Twist.

Bartlett has written a superb play. He has the cast half singing, half talking in different scenes as they join a narrator in stitching together different scenes from the story. The tale of Oliver is used as an allegory, as Dickens used it, to tell the story of London’s orphan plague and criminal society in the nineteenth century. It has heroes and villains, numerous marvelous characters, lots of drama and, thank God, the mercurial and beloved Oliver, who represents every child who ever lived. Bartlett has dropped some scenes and characters, but has held fast to the basic plot of the book.

The play takes place in a sordid and splendid set created by Brian Ruggaber. He has rebuilt the old warehouse where Oliver toiled, with darkened, theater high sets of grimy, smoky windows, lots of doors and platforms. As the play starts, the audience looks at the set and hears the loud thumping of factory engines in the distance. Everything is gray and foreboding. It yanks you back to the 1830s in a second.

Brian Crowe has done a fine job of directing the rather complicated play, in which people are constantly running about and scenes shift quickly. From start to finish, Crowe wisely concentrates on the characterizations of his key players -- Oliver, Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Nancy and Bill Sikes.

They make the play as good as it is, and it is very good. Quentin McCuiston is the easy to love Oliver. Fagin is ably played by Ames Adamson. Robbie Collier Sublett, with his sharp British accent and swagger, is a good Artful Dodger. Nancy, the tavern wench who does all she can to save Oliver, is played well by Corey Tazmania. Jeffrey Bender is a thoroughly nasty and scary Bill Sikes (he is also an hilarious Mrs. Sowerberry). Other fine performances are from Eric Hoffman as Mr. Bumble and John Little as Mr. Brownlow, the man Oliver tries to rob and brings him to his home.

What is rewarding about the superb show is the look at the history of London and its underclass in the 1830s, as graphically described in Dickens’s novel, which began as a magazine serial. Dickens and his family were tossed into debtors’ prison in London when the writer was a young teenager. He was forced to work in a dreary factor in a congested neighborhood for three months until his father got out of jail. There, Dickens saw the brutality of the workhouses, and the flood of orphans working in them. He also saw, up close, the lives of urchins working in the streets, gangs that were the scourge of London in that era (and in American cities, too). He used the lives of people he met, and the neighborhood where he lived and worked, to produce the book.

London, and American cities, were flooded by orphans in that era. Alone, or in gangs, they terrorized the populace with pickpocketing, home and store robberies and other crimes. There were no official police in London or American cities yet, just inept constables who did little. People in England, especially, were fearful that a huge underclass of criminals was developing that would ruin society. They lived in a shadow work just a step away from the mainstream, civilized world of most Londoners. That sense of people being a step from a shadowy world of thugs wherever they lived, a breath away from disaster, is driven home in the play in New Jersey.

The reaction to the novel Oliver Twist was swift and powerful. The government started new investigations into the orphan problem, tried to clean up the streets, cracked down on pickpocket gangs and street gangs in general and created a professional police force. The street gangs in London, and American cities, died out by the late 1850s.

You learn all of that in this savagely written and beautifully staged version of Oliver Twist in New Jersey. You want more gruel, too.

PRODUCTION: Produced by the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey. Music by Kris Kukul, Sets: Brian J. Ruggaber, Costumes: Nancy Leary, Lighting: Andrew Hungerford, Sound: Steven Beckel. The play is directed by Brian Crowe.