Richard Williams's new version of the Charles Dickens classic is emphatically not Oliver!, but Oliver with a twist. Williams investigates the dark side of Dickens's rags-to-riches fable, interpreting Oliver's journey as a Blakean song of innocence and experience, accompanied by the clanking of mind-forg'd manacles rather than winsome workhouse tunes.
Stephen McNeff's fine score opens with the pitiful percussion of scraped pewter bowls, and builds to a pulse-quickening suite of dissonant chamber music for the death of Bill Sikes. McNeff also intersperses the narrative with intriguing madrigal settings of William Blake's odes to poverty and oppression. It's a fine idea that provides a sobering choral commentary to the image of ruddy-cheeked beadles and cheerful orphans; it also reminds us that Dickens was writing a powerful indictment of childhood corruption, not designing Christmas cards.
Williams animates his adaptation against a towering slope of mouldering planks, his assured crowd-handling and shifting stage pictures jostling us through the unsavoury fug of the Victorian underworld. Like its hero, Williams's version has scarcely any excess meat on it at all: the essence of Dickens's novel is distilled into a rapid sequence of vignettes that materialise, make their point, and melt away.
Bob Goody gives a compelling central performance as an emphysemic Fagin, who scuttles around trailing handkerchiefs and wheezing like an adenoidal donkey. Political correctness doesn't enter into this story: Dickens's portrayal of the unscrupulous Jew is one of the least palatable of his creations, and Goody does little to ingratiate the character or soften the anti-Semitic edges. This is a fascinating, feral Fagin whom no one could love.
Mark Williamson excels as the strangely passive, angelic little hero as he is buffed, cuffed and bundled through his eventful young life. At just over 90 minutes the whole thing is impressive in its brevity - but would it seem churlish to ask for a little more?
· Until January 19. Box office: 0151-709 4776.
