OLIVER TWIST: Is it Brecht or boo-hoo Bartlett is aiming at?
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Oliver Twist gets the Brecht treatment in Neil Bartlett’s new adaptation at American Repertory Theatre (at the Loeb Drama Center through March 24). Bartlett, who first directed the show in London, presents it as a literary narrative, with sections of Dickens’s novel read aloud by Carson Elrod to bridge the dramatic scenes. And some of the visual elements — the footlights, Rae Smith's [please see correction below] clever box set — hark back to the conventions of 19th-century melodrama and music hall. But Bartlett’s point isn’t really to evoke the period in which the book was written. The down-front lighting (by Scott Zielinski) [please see correction below] drains the actors’ faces, so that when they huddle together at the play’s opening they look like a band of ghosts. This effect works together with the narrator, the portions of text sung a cappella by the ensemble, and the heavily stylized acting to put quotation marks around the material.
Bartlett’s approach certainly worked on the opening-night audience, which cheered and gave the show a standing ovation. But I have to confess I don’t get the point of applying all these distancing devices to Oliver Twist, unless you find Dickensian sentimentality bourgeois and offensive, as Brecht certainly would have. And Bartlett obviously doesn’t. He wants to underscore Dickens’s message about cruelty to children — which is so obvious in the novel that to point it up seems a prime example of gilding the lily. Moreover, he likes the sentimentality. He interrupts the flow of the story with all these Brechtian techniques, but then he directs Elrod to read the literary sections straight, with extra emphasis on the pathos. It’s as if, at the end of Die Dreigroschenoper, after the company steps forward to sing the moral about poverty and corruption, Brecht and Weill had added a tender description of a child starving to death on the open road and made the audience cry.
Oliver Twist is great dramatic material, as the last three movie versions (1948, 1968, and 2005) prove. But Bartlett manages, against all odds, to make it rather dull. Drawing on his Théâtre de Complicité training (he was one of its early members), he comes up with some bits of pared-down, openly theatrical staging, like having Elrod catch the exhausted Oliver (Michael Wartella) as he trudges toward London after escaping from his indentured enslavement at Mr. Sowerberry’s funeral parlor. But then he repeats them — and repeats them. (We have to watch Oliver stagger and nearly fall seven times, once for every day of his journey.) And the deliberately flat, frontal staging undercuts even his best ideas. It feels like hours before he’s done with the sequence where Fagin (Ned Eisenberg) and his boys teach Oliver how to slip a hanky out of a gentleman’s back pocket. And the set-up to get Nancy (Jennifer Ikeda) to London Bridge — where she meets secretly with Rose Brownlow (Elizabeth Jasicki), the daughter of Oliver’s rich benefactor, to convey the whereabouts of the kidnapped boy — is about as interesting to look at as a high-school football coach’s game plan.
ORSON’S SHADOW: This one picks up when it lightens up.
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Easily the best piece of staging is Elrod’s transformation from the narrator into Fagin’s star pupil, the Artful Dodger, and Elrod’s quick-witted, physically assured performance is the production’s highlight. Thomas Derrah makes the most of the cynical Mr. Grimwig, who’s forever threatening to eat his own head, and even if you’ve seen Remo Airaldi’s shtick a hundred times, it’s hilarious when he applies it to the beleaguered Mr. Bumble in the second act, after marriage to an iron-willed woman (Karen MacDonald) has worn him down. (Airaldi is a master of the suspended punch line.) But Ned Eisenberg, a fine character actor who did wonders with the small role of Uncle Morty in last season’s Lincoln Center revival of Awake and Sing!, is miscast as Fagin, and his lengthy second-act speeches are a trial to sit through — especially the one where he unaccountably slips into a Russian accent (presumably another Brechtian impulse of Bartlett’s). And the rest of the cast are stuck shoehorning their talents into characters that Bartlett has stripped down to single notes. The most egregious — because it also seems to be exactly the wrong note — is Jennifer Ikeda as a sour, sullen Nancy, whom Rae Smith [please see correction below] has costumed as if she were one of the Dreigroschenoper whores.
By contrast, it’s the actors who make a dragged-out Orson’s Shadow at the New Repertory (through March 18) worth the time. Not having encountered Austin Pendleton’s play (from an idea by Judith Auberjonois) previously, I couldn’t tell how much of the problem was in the script and how much in Adam Zahler’s direction. It’s a combination, I suspect. The play centers on the attempt of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier to collaborate on the English premiere of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the National Theatre in 1960 — an attempt that ultimately (and predictably) failed and brought a premature end to Welles’s stage career — and it contains acres of exposition. Even if you don’t go into the show armed with much information about Olivier’s decade-long collaboration with the theatrical critic Kenneth Tynan at the National or his marriages to Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright, you’ll probably find Pendleton tells you far more than you want to know. Or at least that he renders the background material in heavy, square-cut chunks. On the other hand, the play feels as if it ought to be played for comedy — the poster in the lobby advertises it as “a comedy by Austin Pendleton” — but Zahler tends to go for drama: big grandstanding speeches, intense exchanges. (Leigh’s second-act breakdown, to pick a striking example, cries out for humor Zahler won’t supply.) The result is a shapeless, somewhat puzzling evening that picks up only when it lightens up.