Oliver! at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

Rowan Atkinson on playing Fagin I The producer of Oliver! on his West End life

Mr Bean as Dickens’s gaunt, beaky Fagin? Rowan Atkinson as the sly old monster who ends up hideously squawking as he’s hauled to execution? That sounds less likely casting than Griff Rhys Jones or Mel Smith as the withered Scrooge. But then Lionel Bart’s Fagin isn’t quite Dickens’s Fagin. Indeed, he lands up, not on the public gallows, but scuttling away into the London sunset, punished only by the loss of the jewels he has (presciently, you might now think) regarded as a sound alternative to an old-age pension.

So all credit to Atkinson for giving Fagin at least as much menace as Jonathan Pryce and Robert Lindsay, who were superlative in Sam Mendes’s revival of the musical 14 years ago. True, he gratuitously reassures the audience by giving them the odd reminder of his prime claim to fame. He stages a goofy, jokey battle between stolen pearls and his beloved tiara and he even cuddles an antique teddy. But, praise be, he then casually chucks the fluffy bear into a furnace and reverts to being what he unsentimentally is most of the time: not an old Bean but an infinitely creepy criminal with lank hair, a yellow face and a sinister, silvery glint in his eyes.

Related Links
Oliver! pulls in £15m before opening
I can’t say that Rupert Goold, who is credited as the director, does much to reinvent Mendes’s production as I recall it, but he certainly gets plenty of energy out of his cast. Things start as they mean to go on in the towering workhouse — iron stairs, bleak benches, a palpable stench of lovelessness — that is just one of Anthony Ward’s splendidly atmospheric sets. Scores of small grey boys drill, sit, even eat in military unison before Oliver makes his plea for a little more food, glorious food — and then they wildly, furiously, jubilantly riot.

The particular Oliver chosen to perform last night was Harry Stott, a gentle, likable boy who could maybe produce more fear when he’s asked to sleep with the coffins that belong to his boss — Julian Bleach, looking as if he’s slithered out of a crypt in Transylvania — and more rage when his dead mother is horribly insulted.

And did Jodie Prenger, who won the role of Nancy in one of those deplorably sadistic television contests, justify her choice? I must admit she did. Initially she struck me as parading, posturing, performing rather than acting, but she went on to prove herself a tough, coarse, credible presence with a big, robust voice — and that’s all that is needed.

Bart’s songs may be unsophisticated and the rhymes sometimes feeble (“where oh where is love, does it fall from skies above?”), but they’re so tuneful and put over such elan that last night’s audience rightly cheered Consider Yourself, You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two and several others. Moreover Matthew Bourne handles the thronging crowds with none of the cuteness that they so often attract from choreographers in musicals — though aren’t the bikes a bit anachronistic? — and Ward makes London a character in its own right: a looming St Pauls, swiftly moving and interlocking alleys, and a very Dickensian murk for Bill Sikes to run through.

Burn Gorman’s Sikes is a particular success, a pale, quiet figure who threatens more with his stillness than with his cudgel. There’s also a good, swaggering Dodger from Ross McCormack. And, yes, we end up with more of Dickens’s sentimentality than his horror. But that’s Bart for you, and his Oliver! remains as good and revivable as anything he wrote