DETAILS

Oliver Twist or, The Street Boy's Progress by ATP
Martha Cohen Theatre
Saturday, November 24 - Thursday, December 27

More in: Theatre

Christmastime. That wonderful (bitterly cold) time of year, when candy canes hang from shop windows (or metal bars, in response to the higher break-in rates), sugar-plums dance in children's heads (and enormous credit card bills in their parents') and goodwill practically radiates off people in warm waves (which would be of more use to the countless homeless who freeze to death every year, but, as everyone knows, homeless people are incapable of life-saving goodwill radiation). Tickets to A Christmas Carol or any other timeless holiday production are but a phone call away and the cineplexes are packed with big-budget, Christmastime crowd-pleasers. Alberta Theatre Projects, on the other hand, is of the mind that nothing says “happy birthday Jesus” like a story about a viciously abused street urchin in Victorian London who only just avoids death by dysentery, syphilis or consumption. Like many other Christmas plays, Oliver Twist might bring a tear to your eye, but it won’t be in the way that you're used to.

“One of the other things that appealed to me about the play is that, with this particular adaptation, we're trying to avoid seasonal festivities defined by Hallmark cards,” says Bob White, ATP's artistic director, and the play’s director. “One of Dickens's original intentions, obviously, was to provide a little bit of social criticism, and I think that's one of the things that appealed to me about the adaptation. What Dickens was writing about in 1830s London has a lot of resonance for modern society. As strange as this story may appear on the surface, things like street crime and youth crime and people trying to survive in a society that doesn't really care about them is actually happening on the streets of Calgary today.”

For all its darkness, the ATP holiday production of Oliver Twist is still a decidedly family-friendly affair. Micheal O'Brien's adaptation of the Dickens classic, for one thing, includes the wry humour and whimsy of the original novel as well as its grimmer overtones. Made popular by his adaptations of canonized literature, O'Brien worked with White once before on a production of his critically acclaimed Hamlet re-imagining, The Mad Boy Chronicle. ATP also produced O'Brien's adaptation of Treasure Island in 2005.

“He doesn't pull any punches in terms of the adaptations — they are a work in and of themselves,” says White. “I've always admired his abilities to distill these classics and come up with a version that's not only true to the source but is eminently playable as well.”

Slight changes to the shape of the story occur in the production design as well. The costuming, rather than mimicking London fashion in the 1830s, is somewhere closer to the tinted sunglasses and colourful ensembles of English pop music. The Artful Dodger (Joel Smith) has done away with his top hat and fingerless gloves, replacing them with a plaid tie and a jailbird, long-sleeved shirt (something that Pete Doherty might be escorted away from Kate Moss's house in). Fagin (Haysam Kadri) cuts a silhouette closer to an early-’90s Bono than his more common portrayal as a Jewish stereotype.

“I thought in reading some of the previous versions (that) while Fagin is kind of a scary guy, it would be pretty easy to make that more of a comic turn than what he is, which is the head of the gang,” says White. “So I decided to cast younger. Now we have Haysam Kadri, who is in his 30s, playing Fagin. When you have a younger, dynamic person leading this gang, I think it gives it a very different energy, and different kind of threat. It makes it scary. While we're not doing it in this style, what it does remind me of is Tony Montana in Scarface. He's a real thug.”

Besides the visual changes, the English accents have also been done away with — White was worried that having the characters speak to each other in a regional cadence would add an unnecessary level of distance to the material. If it’s played with delicacy and nuance to match its creativeness and ambition, Oliver Twist could be just as memorable a Christmastime play as those that eschew the usual holiday sentimentality.