Stage-to-screen review: Oliver Twist

The National Theatre's NTatHome platform won't be troubling Netflix in terms of volume of content any time soon, but its library has grown significantly since it launched a couple of years ago. As well as the NT's own archive and the productions screened to cinemas with NTLive, it also makes sense as a longer-term home for filmed performances that were screened online during lockdown by a variety of UK theatres, on a variety of platforms. So one such show is Leeds Playhouse's 2020 adaptation of probably the best-known full-length novel by Charles Dickens (Chickens to his friends,) Oliver Twist. Intended to tour, which obviously in 2020 wasn't going to happen, Amy Leach's production was instead made available to stream, in a filmed version that occasionally uses subtitles to supplement the access features that are incorporated into the staging itself.

The production was created with Ramps on the Moon, the collaborative project between seven major theatres to showcase the work of D/deaf and disabled artists, and as such has captions, BSL and audio description integrated into the storytelling, but adaptor Bryony Lavery has also used the company's disabilities (particularly those with hearing impairments, which seems to be the majority,) to refocus the story itself.

So when a destitute, deaf woman dies in childbirth her son, Oliver (Brooklyn Melvin) is raised in orphanages and workhouses, by a succession of people happy to leave their charges in squalor while singing their own praises for their charitable work. Oliver is profoundly Deaf and can't communicate verbally, so he's consistently misunderstood and scapegoated, until he runs off with a group of pickpockets: Fagin (Caroline Parker) has assembled a family of young runaways, who use their disabilities as distractions to rob people in broad daylight.

Lavery's script has a lot of neat technical touches that both serve to make the play accessible (sometimes the chorus of actors decribe the scene in what is consciously intended to be integrated audio description for the sight-impaired,) and subtly refocus the story on the characters' deafness (hearing characters speak regular English; those D/deaf characters who speak, do so with the staccato syntax of BSL.)  As is so often the case, these practical changes often come up with striking dramatic moments you wouldn't get otherwise, like Nancy (Clare-Louise English) narrating her own grisly murder.

The nods to the way Dickens' messages about society's treatment of the less fortunate remain all-too-topical could be subtler, especially at the end, but it's interesting how, after a decade of disabled people being cast as villains and scroungers by the UK Government, there's a particular focus on the kind of Victorian moralising that makes the more villainous characters justify their abuse. From child abuse to murder, this is an almost relentlessly grim story which for the most part Leach deals with with frantic action as the sprawling novel is told in two hours; there's not much of Dickens' famous sense of humour except when Oliver meets the Artful Dodger (Nadeem Islam,) whose first action on meeting him is to teach him BSL in an entertaining scene. Mitesh Soni's chipper Charlie Bates also helps bring some levity when things threaten to get too bleak.

And in the end language, and willingness to make concessions to other people's needs, ends up being the overarching theme of the adaptation: Mr Brownlow (Christopher Wright) wants to help Oliver, but only by denying him use of sign language and trying to force him to communicate in a spoken language he can't understand. On the other end of the spectrum the murderous Bill Sykes (Stephen Collins) demands the gang only communicate in BSL, in part so they can't be understood by the police. In the end the dominant voice is Rose (Katie Erich,) who's deaf and can communicate through language and lip-reading, but tailors Oliver's education to his own needs. Despite some heavy-handed touches, this is generally worth catching as an interesting look at how a classic text can be repurposed wholesale without losing its essence.

Oliver Twist by Bryony Lavery, based on the novel by Charles Dickens, is available to stream via NTatHome.

Running time: 2 hours.

Photo credit: Anthony Robling.