There were six stage adaptations of Oliver Twist within a year of its 1838 publication. And, even if Neil Bartlett's latest version by no means gives us the whole novel, it goes lickety-split for the essentials: the Manichean struggle between good and evil, the nightmarish melodrama, the work's inherent theatricality.
Bartlett, as both director and adaptor, never lets us forget that Dickens was a dramatist manque. The designer, Rae Smith, has devised a stage-within-a-stage that, with its trapdoors, flyropes and footlights resembles a Victorian penny-gaff.
The conventions of melodrama are enhanced by Gerard McBurney's music, which oscillates between a capella choruses and sinister accompaniments on violin, hurdgurdy and serpent. And the 13-strong cast constantly switch characters as if delighting in impersonation.
Inevitably you pay a price for treating the novel as helter-skelter melodrama. Dickens's rage against the New Poor Law, which precluded able-bodied paupers from relief, is underplayed. You also lose the microscopic eye for detail that is the mark of genius: the wisp of human hair on Sikes's club, for instance, that sizzled when he threw it on the fire.
But, although Bartlett has telescoped the action, he conveys the longing for home, love and affection that underscores the novel and the sense that the orphaned Oliver is being confronted by a series of surrogate families before achieving the Edenic ideal.
The main beneficary of Bartlett's melodramatic approach, however, is Michael Feast's superb Fagin. He in no way resembles the "very old shrivelled Jew" with matted red hair of Dickens's text.
Instead, Feast presents us with a piratical, moustachioed Cockney who views Oliver with a mixture of villainous appropriation and vaguely paedophiliac affection: it is when he croons "face like an angel" that you fear most for Oliver's safety.
And, in his final moments of dementia in his prison cell, Feast achieves an evil grandeur that almost elicits our sympathy. Bill Sikes loses something of his brutal ugliness and Monks disappears altogether. But Owen Sharpe makes a sharply defined Artful Dodger, Paul Hunter's Mr Bumble treats his vast stomach as if it were a directional compass, and, against the odds, Bartlett makes the virtuous characters credible. You may not get all of Dickens. But Bartlett genuinely illuminates the novel's moral contest in which the angelic Oliver is pitched into a dream world where good finally triumphs over evil.
· Until March 27. Box office: 08700 500 511.
