Susannah Clapp

Everything here is recognisable but strange, suggestive rather than explicit: crumbling masonry, an enormous mural of Saddam Hussein, rising smoke from unseen depths. Later, a huge stars and stripes is slapped across one side of the stage, and the memories of a garden of topiary animals – an alternative Eden – are floated. At the desolate end of the evening, a woman stands in black robes and sings. She is a leper; everyone around her is dead. These are scenes that might dismantle a mind.

Superb lighting by Paule Constable and Ben Jacobs shows the action as if through Oliver’s eyes: a harsh glitter of grey over the workhouse; a deceptive golden glow for Fagin’s den. Lez Brotherston’s busy brown Victorian stock design is unsurprising but efficient. Movement, vocal and visual, is constant: urchins being thrown like parcels; solos blending into choruses. Oscar Conlon-Morrey is a magnificent Bumble – the “chubby hubby” whose voice shakes the stage; Billy Jenkins, as bendy in body as in morals, is lithe and blithe as the Artful Dodger, his jauntiness dipping only when Bill is referred to as his role model: the bad father.