Are you in the mood for, or – as you tear your eyes from the Iowa results and assorted other horrors – in desperate need of distraction? Something escapist that will require little in the way of close attention or emotional investment? You are? Then walk this way to Disney’s light, breezy sequel to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist – The Artful Dodger starring Thomas Brodie-Sangster as the erstwhile pickpocket and David Thewlis (on top form) as his legendary former boss Fagin.
At the end of Dickens’s tale, the indefatigable Jack Dawkins is at last caught, and sentenced to transportation to Australia for stealing a silver snuff box. The show’s creators, James McNamara, David Maher and David Taylor, pick up the story 15 years later, by which time Dodger has found a way to put his nimble fingers to better use and is making a name for himself as an up-and-coming surgeon in the penal colony of Port Victory. It is, unfortunately, a largely unsalaried role and to make ends meet, he plays cards. Yet more unfortunately, he is cheated by crooked harbourmaster Darius Cracksworth (Tim Minchin) and, as we meet him, needs to find £26 by the end of the week or lose a hand. And a surgeon, even in a Victorian penal colony when the job mostly comprises the ability to hack off a limb in under 30 seconds, requires both.
When Fagin turns up among the next shipment of convicts – was he ever really going to let himself be hanged at Newgate? – and blackmails Dodger into letting him become his personal servant, the stage is set. The meat of the series is in the resurrection of the old partnership and the skirmishes as they try to find a way to pay off the gambling debt. And, just possibly, do Fagin a little good in the meantime. Jewels, church corruption, a network of recidivists gradually uncovered by Fagin and much more are stirred into an entertaining mix and keep the action moving nicely.
But a young hotshot surgeon does not just require two hands. He must also have a romantic subplot. Here it is supplied by the governor’s daughter Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), who – unlike her younger sister Fanny (Lucy-Rose Leonard, turning a small part into a disproportionately delightful performance) – has no interest in getting married. She is obsessed with medicine, up to date on all the new ideas about hygiene, microbes and anaesthesia and wants to become a doctor. When she sees Fagin half-inch the ruby necklace of a guest at her father’s ball and deliver it to Dodger, she blackmails him into taking her on as a trainee. I’m sure Dodger will have an honest relationship with someone sometime, but life in a penal colony does not seem conducive to it.
At least in Belle he has someone to help him temper the head of the hospital’s drunken excesses and put some new, cleaner practices in place. Belle, however, is suffering from a private malady that Dodger’s initial and completely non-erotic examinations have left him so far unable to diagnose. I hope it does not worsen over the coming episodes, reach a sudden crisis point and require the dramatic intervention of the good doctor in a nail-biting finale. No, it will probably go away of its own accord.
The Artful Dodger is a romp. It’s fast and great fun, with a script that is admirably better than it needs to be (the rubies in that necklace shine “Like sun through summer wine,” says Fagin longingly. “Makes you almost wanna taste them.”). There are signs early on that it could also be more than just a romp. Dodger and Fagin’s reunion is painful. The former is wounded by the latter’s abandonment of him to his fate, and Fagin himself is caught in a rare moment of truth when he says he welcomed the gallows in recompense for betraying the boy: “I have always loved you, in my own odd way.” Like Dickens in his original form, it moves you suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. This potentially knotty relationship is quickly given up as they embark on their new life of crime together, with Dodger’s pain dissipating into mild resentment as he finds himself back to his old tricks.
But it retains some heart and all of its easy charm. Let it lighten your mood and take your mind off things for an hour or so. The world will go back to trying to saw your leg off with a rusty blade soon enough.
The Artful Dodger is on Disney+ now
