Race-blind, gender-blind, disability-blind casting. All have become increasingly commonplace in theater and don’t normally merit comment. Conscious casting of minorities is another matter. I find it an increasingly interesting choice since it demands that we pay attention to, rather than ignore, the race or gender or disability of an actor. It brings the unexpected to the fore and make us rethink our initial ideas about a work.
Miranda Cromwell and Marianne Elliott’s reimagining of Death of a Salesman as the story of a Black family is perhaps the most prominent and exciting recent example. A recent production of Oliver Twist (now available to stream on NT at Home) also shows how powerful conscious casting can be. This new adaptation of the familiar story was developed by Leeds Playhouse in conjunction with Ramps on the Moon, a collaborative group whose stated aim is “to enrich the stories we tell and the way we tell them by normalising the presence of deaf and disabled people both on and off stage.”
Forget anything you may remember from the musical Oliver. There are no dancing urchins here, no Oliver singing to Nancy that he would do anything for her. This play is dark. Bryony Lavery’s adaptation puts deafness, and disability more generally, at the heart of this story, along with the cruelty society inflicts on the marginalized.
Oliver, played by deaf actor Brooklyn Melvin, is not just a poor orphan. He is completely unable to communicate until taken in by the Artful Dodger, who teaches him sign language. Oliver finds a home of sorts with the largely deaf and disabled members of Fagin’s gang.
Fagin is herself a deaf woman, a brilliant piece of casting. Since Fagin has always functioned as a twisted parental figure, a female Fagin, a woman who shares the same disability as her young charges, becomes an even more powerful and disturbing presence. This Fagin is completely convinced of her virtue: she is the warm mother who provides a home for those with no other place to go.
And, cruel and selfish as she is, she’s not wrong.
It is hard to see any other welcoming place in this portrayal of nineteenth century London. The harshness extends well beyond the familiar cruelty of the beadle, Mr. Bumble, and the workhouse matron, here Mrs. Thingummy. This version begins with Oliver’s mother begging for help on the street. The indifferent passersby send her to the workhouse, where she dies giving birth to Oliver.
And the production complicates the character of Oliver’s benefactor by splitting him in two: the kindly Mr. Brownlow now has a deaf daughter, Rose. Mr. Brownlow himself practices the oblivious cruelty of the enlightened man who thinks he knows what’s best for the needy. An advocate of “oralism”, he insists on tying Oliver’s hands together so that he will learn to speak instead of sign. It falls to Rose to save Oliver from the benevolent cruelty of her father as well as the indifferent cruelty of the streets.
Oliver is saved, as the story demands. But this production does not leave us with the simple satisfaction of knowing that goodness has triumphed when our hero finds a loving home and family. What about the rest of the gang, the rest of the homeless? The remainder of the cast, now dressed in worn winter coats, remind us powerfully that Dickensian London is not so distant from our own world.
I’m reminded of comments Zadie Smith has made about the “problem play”, which she describes as “a situation in which not everyone ends up happy and married, nor everyone bleeding or dead.” Problem plays, she observes, “seem closest to the mixed reality of our lives.”
She goes on to recall a production she saw as a teenager of Measure for Measure, in which Claudio was played by a Black actor and his sister Isabella by a white actor. This is the play, of course, where Isabella tries to convince her brother to allow himself to be executed rather than ask her to give up her virginity. As Smith recalls,
I was more struck by that scene than anything I’ve seen on stage before or since… There was poor Claudio alone, at the back of the stage, in prison for much of the play, while the rest of the characters were busy downstage, seeking their happy endings. I can remember thinking: yes, that’s right. The happy ending is never universal. Someone is always left behind…
“Zadie Smith on NW” The Guardian 1 August 2013
By bringing their full selves to the story of Oliver Twist, this cast of deaf and disabled actors powerfully remind us who in our society remain left behind.
Lisa, as you describe this it’s a novel reimagining, yet one that also seems in service of the story. One can imagine Dickens approving, or even penning it. Tiny Tim, after all. We’ll need to get ahold of the NT streaming app.
In 1948 David Lean directed the finest film version. The grimness of the workhouse and the slums, the harrowing murder of Nancy, and Alec Guinness’s Fagin, so full-on Cruickshank in makeup (stand aside Bradley Cooper) that the film had difficulty getting released in the States. No hint of sentimentality. Perhaps Dickens would not have approved that!
Only once have I seen a striking on-stage alteration, not nearly as expansive as the new Oliver Twist, which also fully-served the plot. This was David Cromer’s 2006 production of “Our Town” in NYC. The famous key scene, when Emily’s spirit revisits her family kitchen the morning of her 12th birthday. Her expression of familial joy and pleasure is suddenly heightened for the audience by the sound and smell of bacon frying on-stage. It was an electric artistic choice for this typically, indeed always bare-bones, non-naturalistic play. Would Wilder have approved? We know he approved a significant change in the 1940 film version (music score by Copland, who later turned it into the lovely “Our Town” suite).
These choices, ever being made by new artists, breathing life into the old and familiar. Remarkable.
That bacon frying is one of my most powerful theatrical memories! I’d like to think that Wilder would have approved. Cromer’s production was entirely naturalistic until that moment when the family kitchen was revealed behind the back curtain. It was such a stunning way to make us feel the heightened reality that Emily experienced when she came back from the grave.
I loved the intimacy of the theater (the Barrow), the audience so close to the stage and actors, as if we were in the Webb’s kitchen that morning. Honestly, it was thrilling. And the acting—un-stagey, so naturalistic, as you say, Lisa. Cromer, especially relaxed and direct in delivery and command. I’ve seen Frank Craven, who originated the stage role, reprising it in the 1940 film—very stagey. Spaulding Gray, a bit creepy—I have a VHS tape to prove it. Paul Newman, about adequate, no more. Cromer set a high bar. We made the effort to see this play because of the late Terry Teachout’s review in the Wall Street Journal. Every Friday morning, for years, over our breakfast in our kitchen, I turned to his page first. RIP.