Oliver! at the Gielgud Theatre review: this darker take on the classic musical is all killer no filler

Consider yourself consummately entertained if you get a ticket for this exceptional revival of Lionel Bart’s show. Distilled from Dickens and filtered through a mid-20th century sense of the capital’s shifting social tides and undercurrents, it’s the quintessential London musical.

The score of Oliver! is all killer, no filler, from Food Glorious Food to Consider Yourself to I’d Do Anything. It’s boggling to think that the witty book, wildly diverse music and earworm lyrics all came from Bart, the son of working-class Galician Jewish refugees, still in his twenties when he wrote it.

Producer Cameron Mackintosh has mounted blockbuster stagings in the past. Here, with director/choreographer Matthew Bourne, he’s created a more intimate version that evokes the spirit of the 1960 premiere but also treats the story’s trickier aspects with finesse and delicacy.

Simon Lipkin’s piratical, showman Fagin, the Jewish paterfamilias of the underage criminal gang that adopts Oliver, is far from the grasping, kvetching stereotype of yore. Shanay Holmes is tremendous as Nancy, the sex worker in thrall to violent psycho Bill Sikes (Aaron Sidwell, scary).

Four boys share the role of Oliver but on opening night Cian Eagle-Service – so good as spoiled Bruno in The Witches at the National in 2023 – proved capable of heartbreaking pathos. He is also possessed of a high, clear voice and immaculate phrasing.

Of course, there’s also a troupe of smut-faced urchins led by Billy Jenkins’ limber and personable Artful Dodger, their knees and elbows pumping in unison like locomotive pistons in the dance routines. And behind them the roiling tide of London: toffs and shopkeepers, thieves and lost souls. Only Oliver gets out of the workhouse, remember.

The detail is meticulous. Look away from the main action: no one in the background is busking it or marking time. A tiny voice inside me wanted slightly less cockney jollity, but this is Dickens and Bart, so what are you gonna do?

In any case, this Oliver! is darker than most, strafed with rain and suffocated by pea soupers, a place of rank chamber pots and lethal gin. Designer’s Lez Brotherston’s rotating and reconfiguring set of grim gantries and decaying stairwells evokes the Victorian city’s architecture.

Bourne doesn’t stint on themes of social inequality that echo today, but first and foremost he gives us a glorious evening of song and dance. His choreography is tight and exuberant. And my god, the music…

The three numbers I mentioned up top are just a few of the bangers in the first half. And is there a better second-act opening hat-trick in British musicals than the lewd, beery Oom-Pah-Pah, followed by the wrenching As Long as He Needs Me (given blistering torque by Holmes) and the swelling evocation of the awakening, commercial city, Who Will Buy?

But let us, like the script and the score, go back to Fagin. Lipkin plays him as an ageing juvenile suddenly aware of mortality. He has a powerful voice and a flair for physical comedy and has been encouraged to deploy just about the right amount – I think – of improvisation. The show ends with a reprise of his bring-the-house down solo, Reviewing the Situation, with him and Dodger sauntering towards the dawn breaking over St Paul’s. Lovely.

Gielgud Theatre, currently booking until September 2024, oliverthemusical.com.