Rose Theatre Kingston

Oliver Twist

Posted on Mon 16 Jan 2012 by Ciaran McConville

I’m new to blog etiquette, so I’m not sure if cannibalising my programme note from Oliver Twist is cheating. But I suppose if I’m going to plagiarise, it may as well be from myself…

We weren’t supposed to be doing Oliver Twist. Not last week. Not on the main-stage.

Over the summer, I suggested a Community Theatre Festival, a chance for amateur companies to perform one act pieces on our stage during a week in January. Despite a couple of really interesting applications, it didn’t work out. In October, I had to explain to my bosses the big hole that was supposed to be a festival and I was absolutely gutted. This is the end, I thought, of Rose Plus (I have a tendency towards melodrama). It’s a reminder of the knife-edge on which community theatre lives. I want to take risks – I think we all do at the Rose – but one cancelled project can really shatter a whole annual programme.

After the meeting, however, a thought occurred. This was a good thing and something that should happen more often.

Our Rose Youth Theatre juniors had recently pulled-off two performances of The Selfish Giant, which they rehearsed in just five sessions. In addition, our new Sunday group gave us the option of larger projects with a split cast. Last year, I would never have dreamt of putting our juniors on the main-stage with a play as ambitious as Oliver Twist, but there is something about these two groups, the way they work together and their fearlessness, that has lifted my aspirations.

So my failure to organise an amateur festival actually created an exciting opportunity for RYT to collaborate with our production team and, at a relatively early stage, to understand the challenge of working on a big stage under lights.

I always tell prospective students and parents that we’re not a stage school, that the course is designed with an emphasis on process rather than performance. I hold to that. We’re not in the business of making child actors. The life skills learnt in workshops are of far more value, and, as our students move into senior groups, there is an on-going debate to be had with them about the wider importance of theatre and art. That said, the craft of drama only makes sense in the context of performance. I hope the experience of playing the main-stage is something our junior students will be able to take back into their weekly sessions.

It won’t have escaped you, I’m sure, that 2012 is Dickens’ 200th birthday. While Oliver Twist certainly doesn’t qualify as one of his masterworks, it does perhaps have the broadest appeal. Along with A Christmas Carol, it must be the most frequently adapted for the stage (I have absolutely no proof of this) and probably the most popular with children (nor this, but it sounds right).

At twenty-six, Dickens was himself very young when he wrote Oliver Twist. Having already attained success with The Pickwick Papers, he released Oliver in serial form, in Bentley’s Miscellany, a weekly journal that he edited. The cliff-hanger chapter endings proved a big hit and, legendarily, the docks of New York were packed with eager crowds, awaiting each new chapter to be unloaded.

Much later in his life, Dickens would travel from town to town, performing his work to sell-out crowds. He walked many miles in a day and every evening threw himself into impassioned readings. Of all the scenes, the most anticipated was the death of Nancy. Despite suffering from terrible exhaustion, Dickens felt obliged to continue performing it. And whilst he gleefully reported that women in the audience fainted on each account of the murder, the performances took a terrible toll on him, physically and emotionally.

In Preston, April 1869, Dickens collapsed after a reading of Oliver Twist. He never fully recovered his health, but insisted on continuing his farewell tour, adding further performances to his schedule to catch up for his sponsors. In the summer of 1870, he succumbed to a massive stroke. His last words were reportedly, “Be natural, my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.”

So, Oliver Twist played a crucial part in both his youth and decline.

In adapting the book to the stage for the second time (I wrote a two-hander version for a schools tour about ten years ago) I am struck by the presence in the story of both violent death and resilient life. I read the account of Nancy’s murder to my RYT seniors last term and it is truly remarkable, terrifying and incredibly moving. Oliver might suffer from narrative flaws and occasional sentimentality (I omitted Rose and Mrs Maylie from both my adaptations) but it’s a compelling crime-thriller, mystery, adventure and coming-of-age story.

Most of all, Dickens creates an extraordinarily vivid world within the vast London slums; a landscape that teams with life struggling to reach out of the dark, towards the sun; a landscape in which Dickens, with all the eloquence of an enraged reformer, powerfully illuminates the private tragedies of an urban underclass.

Such is the importance of Nancy and Sikes.

We worked the RYT juniors really hard last week, with technical rehearsals in the evenings and two full days over the preceding weekend. The students were great. And I have to say they handled the stress of the directors very well, too.

Of course, I look at an RYT performance and think of the work that is yet to do. The great challenges for a youth theatre performing in a space like the Rose auditorium generally relate to vocal technique and stage-craft. At every one of the RYT shows last year, at least a couple of audience members would come up and say, well-meaningly, “I enjoyed the performance, Ciaran, but I hope you don’t mind me mentioning that I couldn’t always hear them. Maybe tell them to speak up a bit?” And I would smile and thank them for their feedback and then find a door somewhere away from members of the public, which I could head-butt for a while.

Using your voice effectively is hard. Most adults misuse their vocal apparatus and struggle to speak clearly. When I trained as a language teacher a couple of years ago, my course tutor told us to teach the bad habits of British natives to our foreign students, so that they could better fit into society. What does that say about our collective misuse of the English language?

In theatre, of course, the relationship between voice, the body and language is absolutely key to telling a story. And we must continue to push our students hard on that front.

There were, however, some great performances on Saturday evening and the two RYT groups involved became, over the course of the week, a really generous and exciting ensemble. Congratulations to all and thank you to the many people who came to see the show.