The last time Oliver! returned to London’s West End, the year was 2009. I had chosen that summer to show a Jewish friend from New York around town. Posters for Lionel Bart’s musical plastered Soho, each featuring the iconic logo originally developed for Cameron Mackintosh’s 1994 blockbuster production.
Readers may recall this logo. The silhouette of Fagin, the Jewish criminal at the heart of Dickens’s original novel Oliver Twist, was indicated by a red beard and wide-brimmed hat. Across the void of his facial features a graphic designer had spelled out ‘OLIVER!’. Standing out from the other letters, at twice the size, the ‘L’ was grotesquely enlarged into a triangle, forming an obscenely exaggerated nose. I had never once blinked at these posters. My American friend, raised in a climate more willing to confront antisemitism, stopped open-mouthed. “Is this, still… OK for Jews in England?”
Ever since the first publication of Oliver Twist in the late 1830s, the characterisation of Fagin in Dickens’s novel has been widely understood as a pernicious antisemitic stereotype. The Jewish response to Bart’s 1960 musical has always been more nuanced.
Fagin, in Bart’s version, is a loveable rogue, but not the villain of the story—narrative menace is shifted to the gentile role of Bill Sikes, a robber, pimp and abuser of women. Bart himself was born in 1930 as Lionel Begleiter at the Jewish Maternity Hospital in Stepney, the son of refugees from Ukrainian pogroms. His music for Fagin, enriched by Yiddish theatre traditions and joyous strands of Klezmer music, has been celebrated by some critics as an affectionate step towards reclaiming Fagin for a Jewish theatre. But is it possible to reclaim a thief who begins his defining musical number by expressing the core vice that antisemites attribute to Jews: “In this life, one thing counts: In the bank, large amounts!”?
When Mackintosh announced his intention to revive Oliver! last year, he promised to try. He embarked on a careful and well-signalled listening exercise, engaging with Jewish theatre makers about his desire to stage a Jewish-friendly Oliver! His resulting production, now open at the Gielgud Theatre, largely succeeds in this aim, although it can’t quite avoid the odd cringe moment.
Lez Brotherston’s costume design for Fagin—depicted in the programme with forked beard, cap and ringlets—bears painful resemblance to English emblem-book images of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew; fortunately, when that costume materialises on the charismatic Jewish actor Simon Lipkin, it more endearingly recalls Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. Fagin, as ever, attempts to lure the orphan Oliver into a life of crime, teaching him to pick the pockets of the wealthy. But throughout this production, directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne, the characters with pretensions to Christian morality come off far worse.
The monstrous Anglican orphanage in which Oliver spends his early years feels more like the lair of Josef Fritzl than a comic sideshow—a slogan above its gates asserts that “GOD IS LOVE”, edging close to “Arbeit macht frei”. (Children will cope, but parents should be prepared to address these scenes, and Sikes’s coercive control of Nancy, ending in her brutal murder.) Against such Christian hypocrisy, Lipkin’s Fagin offers Oliver the first home he has ever known. It’s just a shame that every time he launches into a big number about his love of cold, hard cash—“I’m a bit of a miser, me”—the Essex inflections of his spoken dialogue seem to break into broad Yiddish dialect.
The orthodoxy that requires minority roles to be played by minority actors has finally been extended to Jews
It is no coincidence that Lipkin is a Jewish actor. One impact of David Baddiel’s bestselling book Jews Don’t Count is that the orthodoxy that requires minority roles to be played by minority actors has finally been extended to Jews. This comes with snags: given our small Jewish community, there are only a handful of Jewish actors in Britain with the stature to lead a West End musical. I understand that Mackintosh put months of work into courting the limited candidates—including explaining thoughtfully how he intended this production to be as sensitive as possible to the Jewish experience.
Casting Lipkin—who brings both vocal charm and moral angst—has paid off. Like most previous productions of Oliver!, however, the aesthetics of this show are imposed top-down by director and designer. This is a show—now extended until March 2026—that runs like clockwork, with every movement so tightly choreographed that numerous actors can and will step into its roles.
This does little to enliven the show’s dramatic spirit: with the exception of Lipkin, and the engaging pair of Stephen Matthews and Jamie Birkett as macabre undertakers, each member of the cast inhales like a wind-up doll before launching into the familiar set-pieces. It is frustrating, too, that such careful design entails little consideration for audiences at the back of the stalls, for whom major moments of storytelling will be invisible, despite tickets costing £80 a pop. The choice of actors for this first run feels barely significant, their ethnicity even less so.
The vision of a show’s creators remains a far more significant indicator of an artistic work’s prejudices than any casting decision. Here, the tension remains between Dickens’s source antisemitism and Bart’s courageous reclaiming. At least, in 2025, Fagin’s nose has vanished from the posters.
