TNT Theatre Britain’s production of Oliver Twist, dramatised by Paul Stebbings and Phil Smith (Manoel Theatre) and directed brilliantly by Stebbings himself deserved larger audiences.

The action and characters are given the larger-than-life dimension of a Victorian melodrama, and the ballads- Paul Xuereb

A pity it was not advertised much more intensively, and an added pity that the Manoel slotted it in the same week as a tango production which played to packed houses.

It is about time this theatre gave the scheduling of drama productions greater attention.

Dickens’ remarkable novel has been dramatised on stage and screen many a time. Its young hero, Oliver, the unsavoury but not entirely dislikeable criminal father-figure Fagin, and the truly detestable beadle Mr Bumble belong to most people’s personal mythology, and like most of Dickens’ novels Oliver Twist is remarkable for its strong, melodramatic plot laced with grotesque comedy.

In the dramatists’ intelligent programme note, the dramatists show why they emphasise the vital connection between corrupt institutions like the workhouse with its brutalising treatment of children and the existence of London’s huge underworld of crime in which children played an important role.

The set of the production is dominated by a gallows with a noose dangling from it, and the scaffold’s trapdoor is not just a vital part of the hanging process but, in this case, is also the entrance to Fagin’s dwelling.

The play begins with Fagin (Eric Tissier Lavigne) about to be hanged, but this does not happen until he has narrated the tale of Oliver Twist who becomes innocently responsible for Fagin’s downfall and execution.

He points out to the audience Lord Brownlow whose expulsion from his home of his daughter Agnes, pregnant by a married lover, leads to Agnes’ giving birth toOliver before dying in Mr Bumble’s notorious workhouse.

The playwrights have ennobled Dickens’ Mr Brownlow, making him a symbol of Britain’s ruling class with its hostility towards the poor workers and hence ultimate responsibility for the widespread criminality.

The action and characters are given the larger-than-life dimension of a Victorian melodrama, andthe ballads and choruses sung by the cast to the music (some of itsharmonically very interesting)of Thomas Johnson give the production a poignant dimension while reminding us that music often played an important part on theVictorian stage and was, of course, the main element in performances of the very popular music-halls of the time.

The audience is addressed from time to time. Fagin does it again and again, trying hard to make it understand why the crimes he is responsible for are the consequence of the country’s unjust society.

Once or twice the auditorium is invaded by members of the cast not in panto fashion but to make the audience feel it is involved in the problems put forward by the show.

Eric Tissier Lavigne’s playing of Fagin puts him firmly at the play’s centre. The programme note charges Dickens with having demonised this Jewish figure but the script of the play does not whitewash him either. He still has his hoard of valuables stolen by his boy pupils, and when Bill Sikes abuses him and threatens him, he gets his own back on Sikes by having Sikes’s girlfriend Nancy followed, and revealed to be trying to get young Oliver recovered by his protector Brownlow. Fagin reports her as a traitor to Sikes and this leads the furious Sikes to batter the girl to death.

Played by Alan Mirren, Sikes is a terrifying, brutal figure whose death when trying to escape the police is the one act of violence in the play that the audience cannot but approve.

Fagin’s hanging right at the end of the play is shocking because by then the audience has come to see him as a figure with some kindly feelings, an intelligent human being who hates what he is doing but cannot help it.

Bumble, on the other hand is an utterly detestable creature bent on satisfying his own desires and viewing the boys under his care as little more than objects who must be exploited mercilessly.

In one of the speeches he addresses to Oliver and the other boys he is given the phrase “Work will set you free”, the cynical phrase placed over the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and this makes him the worst sort of fascist. Alan Mirren plays Bumble as the hideous creature he is, a murderer even, dressed in the pompous uniform of his office.

Oliver and the Artful Dodger are both played by women. RebeccaLivermore is a guileless but plucky Oliver, a figure who easily gets into the audience’s heart, while Dotty Kultys is an Artful Dodger who has the cunning and perception of an adult and does his thieving with an adroitness and elegance that would have graced a dancer.

Jilly O’Dowd is a slatternly and broadly comical Old Sally who helps Oliver escape from the workhouse, and as Nancy she is coarsely sensual but pitiful, fatally for her, towards young Oliver.