Theatre review: Oliver!

After a 2024 full of shows with punctuation in the title, the West End gets the OG musical hit in 2025 with the transferring Chichester Festival Theatre production of Lionel Bart's Oliver Exclamation Mark. Charles Dickens' (Chickens to his friends) story of child trafficking, wifebeating, murder, grooming gangs, antisemitism, alcoholism and a quadruple revolve sees Oliver Twist's (Cian Eagle-Service, alternating with Raphael Korniets, Jack Philpott and Odo Rowntree-Bailly) mother die in a Victorian London workhouse giving birth to him. The child is raised there until the age of eleven, at which point he annoys Mr Bumble (Oscar Conlon-Morrey) by politely asking for a second helping of gruel and has to be got rid of. It being a century too early to sell him to a 1970s DJ, Bumble sells him to an undertaker, but soon the boy is back out on the streets.

Theatre review: Mother Goose (Duke of York's & tour)

I haven't regularly been to Christmas pantomime since Tom Wells stopped writing the Lyric Hammersmith one, but Ian McKellen returning to the role of Dame at the age of 83 has to be something worth catching, and anyway I never saw his Twankey. This time it's as Mother Goose, with Jonathan Harvey writing and Cal McCrystal directing, and with McKellen's commitment to touring it's not even technically a Christmas event - by the time it gets to its last couple of stops it'll be an Easter outing. Another initial selling point was Mel Giedroyc as the goose Cilla Quack, but she had to drop out for personal reasons and Anna-Jane Casey turned out to be very much available to replace her. McKellen's Mother Goose and her husband Vic (John Bishop) run an animal sanctuary in the building that used to house defunct department store Debenhams before 12 years of Conservative government ruined the economy (I'm not editorialising, that's the script.)