The gallows looms large and lethal over the audience, its menacing L-shaped frame stretching towards the sky; at the scaffold’s morbid side, a fearsome life-sized coffin. This is the fear of death in its naked, most terrifying glory. Suddenly, a young woman swathed in 19th century clothing appears. “Are you looking forward to it, too?” she asks the audience, in a bloodthirsty Cockney twang, of the looming public execution.
The second of English author Charles Dickens’ novels, Oliver Twist – the tale of a naive nine-year-old orphan’s miserable existence among a gang of juvenile London pickpockets, first published in serial form between 1837 and 1839 – remains, according to The Children of Charles Dickens author Frank Donovan, one of English literature’s bluntest portrayals of criminals and their sordid lives.
Also known as The Parish Boy’s Progress, this seminal work of Dickens – a child labourer in his early youth – exposes the brutal treatment of many a waif in Victorian London.
His literary model has undergone many transformations since it was first released, perhaps most notably the1968 Academy Award-winning film starring Ron Moody as criminal mastermind Fagin, and one of the most recent is being brought to Cambodia by Britain’s TNT Theatre this week.
In their charming stage adaptation, directors Paul Stebbings and Phil Smith have successfully condensed Dickens’ 500-page novel featuring more than 50 characters into a 90-minute play requiring only five actors.
No mean feat, given the social structures of the day that Dickens is portraying. For this is a world in which poverty and crime go hand-in-hand; in which the ultimate penalty is to hang from a noose until dead, no matter how bad a hand the cards may have dealt you.Here lies the turf of gallows humour, a big city being steered by the criminal underworld – a model that, despite the passage of centuries, still manifests itself in the urban nightmares that plague us today.
But even gallows humour is humour of a sort, and it’s not without a generous helping of slapstick the TNT approach their tragic subject – which is seen in this adaptation through the dying eyes of Fagin as he awaits execution, trying to justify his life of crime. Switching between roles at lightning speed, actors are one minute the money grubbing Mrs Corney, the next the Artful Dodger; first the big-hearted whore Nancy, then the murderous Bill Sykes.
Thomas Johnson’s original score, according to the critics, somehow makes it darker and more real; an effect also achieved by Arno Scholz and Paul Stebbings’s set design.
“The enormous energy of these characters and the full bloodied portrait of the first modern urban nightmare, London, make the story not only exciting and dramatic, but also truly contemporary,” said a spokesman for TNT Theatre.
“The themes and social issues raised by Dickens are as relevant today as they were when the novel was published over 160 years ago. The central theme is the link between poverty and crime. Beyond that it explores the way society treats its weakest members.”
WHO: TNT Theatre Britain
WHAT: Oliver Twist
WHERE: Chenla Theatre, Phnom Penh Cultural Centre, Mao Tse Tung Blvd.
WHEN: 7pm May 6; 11am and 7pm May 7
WHY: Because you’ve got to pick a pocket or two, boys…