With child hunger and antisemitism each making a comeback in Britain, a revival of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! has – amid its tunes, glorious tunes – an unwanted topicality. And though Bart’s 1960 musical twist on Dickens is one to which audiences will always warm, it is notably hard to cast and stage. There is a child central character, meaning that, unusually, the protagonist has only one solo: Where Is Love? And equally unusually for the genre, it has a love story that is violent and coercive: Nancy and Bill Sikes.
After a first hour with no romantic ballads, Bart cleverly contrives one with Nancy, the Dodger and Oliver imagining the love lives of aristocrats in the musically beautiful but dramatically curious I’d Do Anything. Then there’s the Fagin problem. Dickens wrote a stereotype of a seedy, greedy grasper that Bart, who was Jewish, reduced – although the role can still invite cliched mannerisms and delivery.
