Twist Study Guide

A Noise Within Study Guide
Photo by Craig Schwartz.
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist

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Table of Contents
2 3 6 7 Table of Contents Characters, Cast, and Synopsis A Biography of Charles Dickens Oliver Twist and the Heros Journey
10 Timeline of Child Labor in Dickensian England 12 Dickens Oliver Twist: An Interview with Neil Bartlett
14 Staging Dickens: Making A New Stage Version of Oliver Twist 16 Oliver with a Twist 20 Vocabulary from Oliver Twist 22 VISUAL ARTS: Creating the World of Oliver Twist 24 26
Set design by Kurt Boetcher.
The Music of Oliver Twist Bibliography/Resources About Theatre Arts About A Noise Within
27 28
Portions of this study guide reprinted by courtesy of the American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, Mass.
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Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Oliver Twist
Cast of Characters The Artful Dodger Oliver Mr. Bumble Fagin Fagins Gang: Tom, Charley, Toby Mr. Brownlow Rose Noah Claypole Charlotte Mr. Sowerberry Mrs. Sowerberry Nancy Bill Sikes
Pollock, Oliver. (1737-1823) Characters in Oliver Twist.
Plot Summary Scene One: Treats of the place where Oliver Twist was born, and of the circumstances attending his birth. We are welcomed by The Artful Dodger to reflect on the piteous life of Oliver Twist, an orphaned and impoverished child in 1837. The company assures the audience that Oliver is the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance. The Story Begins Olivers origins take us back to a workhouse. His mother, laboring under Doctor and Mrs. Corney, dies during his birth. Unwed, the mother has nothing to pass along to Oliver except perhaps a small locket which Mrs. Corney pockets after her death. She resolves to keep Oliver in her care and feed him gruel. Scene Two: Oliver Twists growth, education and board. Oliver now toils under under Mr. Bumble, a parish beadle, and endures the horrendous conditions typical of orphaned children during this period, and endures constant hunger pangs. Oliver is selected by the other boys to ask Mr. Bumble for more food. Trembling,
Oliver comes forward and makes his famous request: Please sir, I want some more. Mrs. Corney screams in horror, and a great uproar ensues. The workhouse board convenes to decide the fate of this ungrateful boy who dares to ask for more food. It is decided that Oliver will be sold to anybody who will take Oliver Twist off the hands of this Parish for five pounds. Scene Three: Oliver prentissed. Undertakers Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry haggle with Mr. Bumble and purchase Oliver for three pounds to use him as their apprentice. The pair intends to take advantage of Olivers sorrowful face to add just the right mournful touch to their funeral ceremonies. Noah Claypole, a fellow apprentice, and maidservant Charlotte, take a dislike to Oliver and torment him about his mother. A struggle ensues, and Oliver is locked inside a coffin. Scene Four: Oliver walks to London. He encounters on the road a strange sort of young gentleman. Oliver escapes into the night and walks seventy miles to London over the course of seven days. He encounters a
the characters of his new associates, and purchases experience at a high price. In the busy streets of London, Oliver observes Tom, Charley, and Dodger engaged in the act of stealing a handkerchief from an unsuspecting passerby - Mr. Brownlow. The boys are caught in the act. Oliver- who isnt quick enough to escape is blamed for the attempted theft. He is arrested and brought before the magistrate, while the other boys escape notice. Scene Nine: Treats of Mr. Fang, the police magistrate, and furnishes a slight specimen of his mode of administering justice. In front of a drunken magistrate, Mr. Brownlow accuses Oliver of thievery. He initially presses for prosecution, but then realizes that Oliver is quite ill. Mr. Brownlow changes course and advocates for Oliver, wishing to help him. Witnesses to the event resist Mr. Brownlows attempts to procure mercy for the boy, but he eventually succeeds in convincing the magistrate to release the boy into his custody. Charley and Dodger tip Fagin off to Olivers whereabouts nearby Pentonville. Scene Ten: In which Oliver is taken better care of than he ever was before. Rose Brownlow and her father Mr. Brownlow nurse Oliver back to health. Oliver learns from Rose that Mr. Brownlows other daughter died some years ago. Mr. Grimwig enters, troubled by Olivers existence in the house, and warns Mr. Brownlow to count the silver. Meanwhile, Bill Sikes convinces Fagin that Oliver may have too much information about the gangs dealings to be let go. Worried that Oliver will peach to the authorities, Nancy is dispatched to collect him and return him to the hideout. To settle the matter of trust, Mr. Browlow instructs Oliver to return a stack of books to the bookseller, and requests that he bring the change back. Oliver departs, determined to earn the goodwill of the benevolent Mr. Brownlow. Scene Eleven: Showing how very fond of Oliver Twist Bill and Miss Nancy were. Nancy discovers Oliver, who is attempting to dutifully carry out Mr. Brownlows instructions. She makes a scene pretending to be Olivers sister, distraught over losing track of her little brother. Oliver is spirited away, and returned forcibly to the bosom of his new family. Scene Twelve: Which shows what became of Oliver Twist after he had been claimed by Nancy. Oliver is held captive back at Fagins lair. Teased by the boys for his new clothes and books, Oliver pleads with Fagin to release him. Fagin refuses, and Oliver sleeps. Scene Thirteen: While Oliver lay sleeping.
Olivers reception by Fagin and the boys. Illustration by George Cruikshank.
dirty, common-faced, strange boy who turns out to be Jack Dawkins otherwise known as The Artful Dodger. Oliver, with nowhere else to turn, follows Dodger through the maze of London streets and shops to Farringdon Road a well-known den of thieves and Londons underbelly of vagrants and street gangs. Scene Five: Oliver meets a pleasant old gentleman. Oliver, escorted by Dodger, meets Fagin and his gang Toby Crackit, Charley Bates, Tom Chitlin, and others. They feed Oliver, and his allegiance is quickly won. Oliver, exhausted from his journey, sleeps. Scene Six: Which is short, but a key to one that will follow when its time arrives. Mr. Bumble learns from Mrs. Corney that the locket stolen from Olivers mother upon her deathbed may hold some significance as a clue to Olivers family of origin. Scene Seven: Oliver becomes better acquainted with the merry old gentleman and his hopeful pupils. Fagin reveals to Oliver that the gangs source of support is thievery. They teach Oliver to play a new game the sole purpose of which is to train fledgling pickpockets. Oliver observes as Tom practices on Fagin, slipping a handkerchief out of his pocket. The gang is visited by Nancy, who comes to collect dues from her abusive lover Bill Sikes. Fagin pays Nancy and she departs. The gang readies itself to venture into London to extract trinkets and fancies from unsuspecting pedestrians. Nave and hungry for companionship, Oliver opts to join the gang. Scene Eight: Oliver becomes better acquainted with
Rose posts a reward on behalf of her father Mr. Brownlow for the safe return of Oliver, or to any person who will tend to throw any light upon his history. Scene Fourteen: Which contains the substance of a pleasant conversation between Mr. Bumble and a Lady. Mrs. Corney is now Mrs. Bumble. The two converse about the sins and wickedness of the poor. They see Mr. Brownlows announcement in the paper about Oliver Twist, and resolve to collect the reward. Back in Pentonville, Nancy arrives at Mr. Brownlows house and discovers the very same advertisement. Scene Fifteen: A strange interview. Nancy attempts to alleviate her sense of guilt by speaking with Rose by bringing news that Oliver is indeed safe. She refuses to reveal Olivers whereabouts, and goes to leave. Rose convinces Nancy to set a weekly meeting place where she can receive news about Oliver they will meet each Sunday on London Bridge at twelve oclock. Nancy leaves quickly. Scene Sixteen: Wherein Oliver is delivered over to Mr. Bill Sikes. Fagin convinces Bill Sikes that Oliver would make an excellent assistant climbing into small windows to break in to commit crime. Fagin assures Bill that Oliver will do anything that he wants if he is frightened enough. Nancy, wracked with guilt, begrudgingly delivers Oliver to Bill. Bill threatens to shoot Oliver if he disobeys any order, and takes him away. Nancy interrogates Dodger in order to track where they are going. Scene Seventeen: The time arrives for Nancy to redeem her pledge to Rose (one week later). Fagin for the first time, is starting to lose his grip. Torn apart with guilt over Olivers abduction by Bill, Fagin wrestles with his fear that Olivers knowledge of his criminal exploits will send him to jail and/or the hangmans noose. After a brief conversation with Fagin, Nancy sets off towards the London Bridge to meet Rose. Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble pursue the reward money for information about Oliver and approach Mr. Brownlows address in Pentonville. Scene Eighteen: Containing fresh discoveries. Upon collecting their reward from Mr. Brownlow, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble reveal that Olivers locket had a name engraved inside. Mr. Brownlow immediately recognizes the locket was his long-dead daughter. Mr. Brownlow vows that neither of the Bumbles will be employed in a situation of trust again as a result of their treachery in stealing the locket. He holds Mr. Bumble equally to blame, citing that the law supposes his wife to be under his direction. It is in response that Mr. Bumble utters
the famous line, If the law supposes that, the law is an ass. The bell chimes midnight. Nancy appears, and Mr. Brownlow and Rose do their best to convince her to give up the whereabouts of the boy. Nancy extracts their promise that they will not prosecute Fagin, bill, or the members of the gang in return. Rose makes a last ditch effort to convince Nancy to leave Bill, and hands her a heavy purse of money. Nancy refuses the money, and as the scene comes to a close it is revealed that Dodger has witnessed the entire bargain. Scene Twenty: Fatal Consequences. Back at Fagins lair, Dodger repeats that Nancy has betrayed them. Fagin repeats the story to Bill Sikes, and provokes his rage. Bill returns home to take his revenge. Scene Twenty-One: A ghastly thing to look upon. Bill confronts Nancy for her treachery, and takes her life in anger. Scene Twenty-Two: On Jacobs Island. The remnants of the gang recount the fate of Fagin he is to be hanged as accessory to Nancys murder on Monday after trial. Oliver cowers in the corner. Bill enters, still caked with blood, to inquire about Fagin. Charley decides that Fagin must not suffer alone for Bills misdeed, and alerts the police to Bills whereabouts. Desperate to escape, Bill ties up Oliver and holds him hostage up on the rooftop with a long piece of rope. A horde of angry onlookers calls for Bills capture. Bill, devising to escape, ties a noose in the rope. He plans to catapult himself off the roof, held by the rope. He plans to cut it with his knife and then drop to the ground. However, at the last moment Bills foot slips and the hangs himself by accident. Scene Twenty-Three: Fagins last night alive. Fagin in his cell speaks aloud to rid himself of his guilt about Oliver, and worries over the eventual fate of his gang. Mr. Brownlow enters to show Oliver the full success of his villainy. Fagin speaks to Oliver desperately, pleading with the boy to help secure his release, to no avail. Fagin is taken away into the dark. Scene Twenty-Four: And last Oliver and Mr. Brownlow return home to Rose. Dodger reports that the three lived happily ever after, or at least as ever can be in this changing world. The rest of the gang Charley, Toby, and Tom, reconsider their life of crime and attempt to live honest lives. Only Charley is successful, and lives in Northamptonshire. Tom and Toby are imprisoned for fraud, as is Dodger himself who eventually dies there.
A Biography of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Charles Dickens, English writer of novels and short stories, was born to John and Elizabeth Dickens in Portsmouth, England on February 7th, 1812. He is one of the most famous English novelists of the Victorian Era. As a young child, Dickens spent most of his time reading. Due to financial difficulties, the family relocated several times until they settled in Camden Town, a poor neighborhood in London, where at the age of 12 Dickens was sent to work in a blacking or shoe polish warehouse. The years spent working in the warehouse made a deep impression on young Charles Dickens, inspiring him to include many economic and child labor issues later in his fiction. While he worked and lived at the warehouse, Dickens father was arrested and confined to a debtors prison. Although an unexpected inheritance relieved Dickens father from his debt, young Charles was forced to work as an office boy at the age of 15, and later as a stenographer in the law courts of London. By 1832 he became a reporter for two London newspapers and in the following year, began to contribute a series of impressions and sketches to various publications. The same year, Dickens began to write The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in several monthly installments. This form of serial writing became a standard method of writing fiction in the Victorian era. In 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the editor of a London newspaper. Together they had ten children.
Theatre Lore
Why do actors say break a leg? Perhaps the saying comesin a complicated wayfrom the use of leg. In theatre, a leg is a part of the mechanics that open and close the curtain. To break a leg is to earn so many curtain calls that opening and closing the curtain over and over during final applause causes the curtain mechanics to break. At the outset of theatre tradition, players acted outdoors, where there were no stages or curtains. Applause came in the form of foot stomping, which could indicate another origin of this phrase.
During his 30s, Dickens went on a 5-month long lecture tour of America, speaking out strongly for the abolition of slavery and of other reforms, and upon his return, he wrote American Notes. When he returned, Dickens was confronted with the death of his father and one of his daughters within two weeks. Partly in response to these losses, Dickens began writing what are now known as his dark novels which include Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit. In 1857 Dickens fell in love with an actress named Ellen Ternan, and separated from his wife after many years of incompatibility. At the end of his life, Dickens devoted much of his time and energy to public readings from his novels. At the time of his death in 1870, he was writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, leaving it unfinished. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. Other novels by Charles Dickens that were adapted into plays produced at A Noise Within include A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.
Oliver Twist and The Heros Journey

Oliver Twist is a version of the heros journey a term identified in 1948 by literary scholar Joseph Campbell. Campbell described the heros journey as a unifying theme of mythology and folklore throughout the world across time, and offers a brief description of the heros journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This ground-breaking work traces the story through many cultures and time periods, and outlines the structure of the heros journey: If Campbell were to summarize Oliver Twist within the context of the heros journey, it might sound like this: Oliver, white male hero of Oliver Twist, dreams of receiving more than the meager sustenance and loveless existence he has at his orphanage home. He receives assistance along the way from his deceased Mothers legacy via Mr. Brownlow, Rose Brownlow, and Nancy. After becoming lost in Londons underground and being held hostage, Oliver eventually emerges triumphant, reclaiming his place among the upper class. As with most traditional heros journeys, all other characters in Oliver Twist serve the hero in one way or another. Mr. Bumbles cruelty provides the hero with the impetus to seek his eventual fortune. Fagins gang serves him by providing shelter, information, and food. Mr. Brownlow serves him by providing the way out of his predicament of poverty.
As with most traditional heros journeys, all other characters in Oliver Twist serve the hero in one way or another.
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
(Campbell, p.30)
There are more deOliver at Mrs. Maylie's Door. Illustration by George Cruikshank. tails that define the All female characters traditional heros in Oliver Twist are left journey according to Campbell. Most feature behind, which is consistent with the heros a male hero who receives spiritual or physical journey model. Olivers Mother has died in assistance from another being usually an childbirth, and Nancy meets an untimely animal. He maintains a shallow relationship death, unable to advocate successfully for with the women who surround him. Women herself and pry herself from the clutches of provide the inciting incident and are used Bill Sykes. Literary theorist Margery Hourihan only to further the heros progress, but reasserts in her work Deconstructing the Hero: main largely inactive. The types of challenges Literary Theory and Childrens Literature, the hero meets vary from tale to tale, but that this is the typical treatment of women wild animals and unsavory, low-life people are in heros journey stories. Women are seen a common theme. The exact nature of the as useless to assist the hero in his journey. heros return varies. Sometimes he refuses They may remain as a source of inspiration, to return entirely in other examples of the or a goal to reach (Odysseus wishes to return tale he returns to the love of the woman he to his wife,) but not an assistant along the left behind. However, the main elements of actual journey. Indeed, Hourihan asserts that the heros journey remain the same, and usuwomen in heros journey stories are not even ally occur in the same order. characters!
Firstly it is necessary to realize that the women are, essentially, not characters at all but symbols in the heros psyche. Because the story is always narrated from the heros point of view women appear only insofar as they are involved in his adventures, and the effect of this is to suggest that women are of no significance except when they make an impact upon men. (Hourihan, pp.156-7) Oliver Twist conforms to the classic heros journey pattern in this very essential way. Hourihan would perhaps argue that Nancy is not even a character in the story. Her ability to speak serves only the purpose of assisting the hero. She does not use her voice to grasp at a new agency in her own life. As Hourihan observes, heroes are traditionally young, and their journeys are often used to describe their coming-of-age. Hourihan and Campbell both link the heros youth to the coming-of-age motif so often featured in American and other European-influenced (i.e. Australian) literature, such as Dickens David Copperfield, or Thomas Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles, with their themes of adolescence realized through worldly challenges. (Hourihan, p.48) Hourihan firmly states that as a rule, Heroes are young. In most versions of the myth there is no recognition of a future in which they will grow old. Hourihan would classify Oliver Twist as a classic version of the heros journey. Oliver is nine years old in the text, and the story seems to conform to the early assertion of will and dominance. Oliver is indeed the first to ever commit the unheard of act of asking for more gruel. It is Oliver who chooses to begin a life of crime as a pickpocket in Fagins gang. Despite the circumstances which seem to afford Oliver precious few other options, it is nevertheless a conscious decision on his part to join the underbelly of thieves. However, even in the most desperate moments of the story, the reader of Oliver Twist senses that no matter what depths to which Oliver must sink in order to survive, he is destined to prevail. This points to another key element essential to a traditional heros journey tale the certainty of triumph. The reader expects victory by the end of the traditional heros journey. This is perhaps because the heros journey format is so prevalent in literature, and the reader knows how it has ended in every other example they have encountered. Or, it could be that authors knowingly or unknowingly include clues that all will be well, and that the hero will prevail. According to Hourihan, the hero story needs merely a linear progression in order to retain its readers interest. She describes a kind of ebb and flow as the reader develops heightened concern for the hero and then lapses into satisfaction as he meets each challenge:
As each incident in the story concludes the desire is temporarily satisfied, only to be restimulated as the hero moves on to the next challenge. [] Because readers have experienced similar text before they know that the hero will triumph and the story will assert the traditional dualisms, and so they have no difficulty in decoding it. (Hourihan, p.46) The traditional dualisms Hourihan refers to are themes that work in pairs opposite each other in heros journey stories. These include white/black, old/young, male/female, logic/emotion, and nature/civilization. According to Hourihan, the certainty of the heros triumph works in concert with the familiar dualisms to arouse in the reader excitement and desire, the desire to know what will happen next. (Ibid.) Indeed, one measurement of a good heros journey story is that at times it is less easy to predict the heros triumph but that the hero does indeed triumph. This is seen in modern movie reviews of films that use the heros journey format. A movie is seen as bad if it is too predictable. In order to achieve this less predictable quality, many modern writers and filmmakers will raise the stakes of each successive trial the hero encounters so that his success seems more and more improbable. This is true of Oliver Twist, as Oliver encounters one obstacle after another each seemingly more challenging to overcome. (Dickens, having written Oliver Twist as a serial publication, doubtlessly included these obstacles also as a way to hook readers into coming back to read each subsequent installment of the story.) Oliver Twist contains key features prevalent in heros journey stories the dualisms of self/other, logic/ emotion, and male/female. It is easy to see the many dichotomies present within heros journey stories that parallel these such as white versus black, or power over versus cooperation with. Literature reinforces these dualisms when it conforms to the heros journey model. The heros journey also reinforces the idea of the natural superiority of the first component of each dualism. Thus, self, logic, and male are supported over their counterparts other, emotion and female. (Ibid.) The traditional hero is the self, as his foes become the other. The identity of the hero is us and the identity of the heros foes is them. Hourihan extends her observation to postulate that: In realistic hero tales the identity of the enemy, of them, changes to reflect political circumstances, but fantasy and science fiction are free to invent images of the others which emphasize our qualities by the force of contrast. (Hourihan, p.3)
these dualisms permeate myths and stories throughout nearly every culture in the world, and throughout every age recorded.
This is a fascinating view and perhaps could be extended to theorize the way in which heros journey stories may serve political aims of governments. (When viewed within the context of wartime propaganda, this idea has merit.) The members of Fagins gang, Mr. Bumble, the Sowerberrys, and the Magistrate Oliver encounters in Oliver Twist are classic examples of the other. They are wild, irrational, sometimes silly or trifling, and bent on destruction of Oliver the self. Their cruelty and oppression of the innocent Oliver is motivated solely by abhorrence of the poor. These underpinnings reveal a refusal to imbue any character other than the hero with meaningful emotion, rationale, or psychological depth. Thus, the dualisms between logic and reason, self versus other, and civilized versus wild are present and operating efficiently within Oliver Twist. Theorists like Campbell and Hourihan establish that these dualisms permeate myths and stories throughout nearly every culture in the world, and throughout every age recorded. It could easily be concluded that the average reader of heros journey stories in childrens literature is well-versed in these dualisms. Thus, their presence a familiar, understandable element within a story greatly enriches the reading (or play-viewing) experience. The self and other in the traditional heros journey are clearly drawn. The story is narrated by or for the self, and the other bears easily identifiable characteristics such as race or class. Closely linked to the self/other is another key dualism featured in heros journeys logic and reason versus emotion. The European roots of the logic versus emotion dualism arise from classical Greece. Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle framed the nature versus nurture debate for the first time. (Plato, source on-line.) Aristotles Poetics is widely accepted to be one of the most foundational works that influenced modern literature, and it included the viewpoint that logic is vastly superior to emotion. According to many feminist theorists, including Rosemary Radford Reuther in New Woman New Earth, the Greeks associated logic and reason with males, and linked
emotion to females. Indeed, Reuther asserts the word hysterectomy came from Aristotles theory that if a woman were not pregnant frequently, she would become literally insane as her womb or in Greek, her hyster, physically wandered up to block off the air to her rational mind. (Reuther, p.69) Women were intrinsically prone to hysteria in Aristotles world. In the traditional heros journey story, the hero triumphs over his foes through a combination of cunning (logic/reason) and physical strength. Traditionally, the other causes their own downfall when emotions run amok, causing logic to fail. This links the self to reason, and the other to emotion. It makes sense then, that heroes are often male in traditional, Greekinspired, Euro-centric literature. Empirical observation of this literature and movies provides us with proof that this is true. In Twist, Oliver struggles with the polarized forces of logic versus emotion. Notably, Olivers sole moment of emotion occurs in Scene Four after the confrontation with the Sowerberrys:
DODGER: It was not until he was left
alone that Oliver gave way to his feelings. Hiding his face in his hands, he wept wept such tears as, God send for the credit of our natures, few so young may ever have cause to pour our before him. Here, it is evident that this logical hero only allows himself a moment of emotion when utterly alone so that no one bears witness to his weakness. In summary, Oliver Twist is a traditional heros journey. It reinforces traditional gender roles and dualisms of logic/emotion and self/other. However, Oliver himself remains an iconic literary figure, and the theatrical versions of the novel are performed numerous times each year in the U.S. and abroad. The novel Oliver Twist is still in print, and has been translated into many different languages. These factors testify to Oliver Twists durability both as a work of fiction and as a play, and its power to inspire in diverse audiences great interest and hope.
Timeline of Child Labor in Dickensian England
Children work in a coal mine as hurriers bringing goods from place to place as quickly as they can.
A child works in a coal mine as a coal tub puller.
1802-1819 The first parliamentary acts are passed to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills attempting to limit their workdays to only 12 hours. These are largely ineffectual. 1824 Charles Dickens works in the Blacking Factory as a result of his familys sentence to debtors prison. 1833 Whig party government recommends that children aged 11-18 be allowed to work 12 hours per day, that children aged 9-11 may only work 8 hour days, and children under age 9 are not recommended to work at all. Previously, children as young as age 3 were permitted to work up to 16 hours per day. 1834 Poor Law sets up workhouses, where the poor are sent to work
off their debts. Many are without homes, so they are able to reside there in return for doing work. 1837 Queen Victoria becomes Queen at the age of 18. 1840 First postage stamps came into use. Only approximately 20 percent of children in London have any schooling at all. 1842 The Mines Act is passed, which aims to end child labor entirely. 1845-49 The Great Potato famine of Ireland. 800,000 people die of starvation. Large numbers of immigrants flee to Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States. 1847 Parliament passes the Ten Hours Bill which limits both
adults and all children to work 10 hours per day. This to be enforced in all of England by a total of four inspectors. 1850 Approximately 120,000 domestic servants in London alone most work 80 hour weeks for one halfpence per hour. Thousands of prostitutes between the ages of 15-22 at work in London. 1851 The Crystal Palace Exhibition a fair of modern engineering and manufacturing arts, modeled after the Paris Exhibition of 1949 1860 A mere half of all children (approximately) in London have some kind of education, which includes Sunday school. The other half spend their days working.
WAGES: NOW VERSUS THEN Shilling: A coin used in the United Kingdom, worth one twentieth of a pound, 5 new pence, or 12 old pence prior to 1971. A typical weeks wages for the average child laborer in 19th Century London was 4 shillings per week, or 1/5 of a pound. Today, a pound is equivalent to $1.69. This means that child workers in Dickensian England earned approximately 34 cents per week. 14% of the workforce in 1740 was under age 14. The average wage for an adult worker during this time was 15 shillings nearly 4 times as much. In the United States today, minimum wage is $6.55 per hour a typical 40 hour week would result in a laborer earning $262.00 per week. Minimum wage in London today is 5.73 or $9.70 per hour.
1 0 A Noise Within 2008/2009 Repertory Season
THE TREATMENT OF CHILD LABORERS

Children working in factories during Dickensian England were frequently orphans. Maltreatment of the child workforce was often justified by factory owners because room and board were often provided for these homeless children. However, conditions were squalid and food was scarce. Often, children reported not being given time during the day to eat even if there was food available they were not allowed to stop working in order to have a meal. One child reported that food left uneaten by the children was given to the hogs because there was no set meal time. Children were frequently beaten and were subject to verbal abuse. One consequence of being late for work that was often inflicted on child workers was to tie a heavy weight around their neck. The child was then forced to walk up and down the aisles in full view of the other children working as an example. This was called being weighted, and led to severe back and neck injuries.
Testimonies of Child Workers in the Coal Mines of Gawber, England

Sarah Gooder, aged 8 years Im a trapper in the Gawber pit. It does not tire me, but I have to trap without a light and Im scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning, and come out at five and half past. I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when Ive light, but not in the dark; I dare not sing then. I dont like being in the pit. I am very sleepy when I go sometimes in the morning. I go to Sunday-schools and read Reading Made Easy. She knows her letters, and can read little words. [...] I would like to be at school far better than in the pit. Mary Barrett, age 14 I have worked down in pit five years; father is working in next pit; I have 12 brothers and sisters all of them but one live at home; they weave, and wind, and hurry, and one is a counter, one of them can read, none of the rest can, or write; they never went to day-school, but three of them go to Sunday-school; I hurry for my brother John, and come down at seven oclock about; I go up at six, sometimes seven; I do not like working in pit, but I am obliged to get a living; I work always without stockings, or shoes, or trousers; I wear nothing but my chemise; I have to go up to the headings with the men; they are all naked there; I am got well used to that, and dont care now much about it; I was afraid at first, and did not like it; they never behave rudely to me; I cannot read or write.
These testimonies were reprinted in, Readings in European History Since 1814, edited by Jonathan F. Scott and Alexander Baltzly, published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. in 1930.
CHILD LABOR IN 2008

Children are still forced to work in many countries around the globe today. Laws prohibiting child labor exist in many countries, but still have yet to be developed in many areas. According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 250 million child laborers aged 2 to 17 worldwide. In 1990, every country in the world except Somalia and the United States signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provides the strongest governing language prohibiting child labor, but does not make it entirely illegal. Raids in recent years on factories in India and Liberia have revealed children as young as 5 years old operating machinery and working in illegal embroidery and tire factories. The U.S. is not immune to this atrocity. One study reports that as recently as the late 1990s, there were still over 59,000 children under age 14 working in the United States. As recently as August of this year, the Iowa meat packing plant Postville revealed it had employed 57 minors in violation of State Law. The case has been turned over to the Attorney General for prosecution of egregious violations of virtually every aspect of Iowas child labor laws.
Dickens Oliver Twist: An Interview with Neil Bartlett
Neil Bartlett
ANW: In adapting Oliver Twist, did you work with a composer during the writing process, or did that come afterwards? Could you describe a bit of that artistic journey? What led you to choose to adapt the play to be interwoven so closely with music? NB: The composer Gerard McBurney and the musical director Simon Deacon were fully involved in the story boarding and development of the adaptation. Right from the start, the intention was that the story should be told with music that the piece should be quite specifically NOT a musical, but a melodrama in the simplest (and best) sense of the word; a drama with music. The sound world rough, raucous, vivid was there from the start something that would rise to the occasion of Dickens
incredibly vivid and forceful prose. So was the idea of using tunes stolen from popular music of the period as the starting point for the score. We tried out the idea of singing the prose using it as written, rather than writing lyrics, in a workshop and found that actors loved that idea of talking directly to the audience in song. Then we hit on the idea that the band should be Fagins gang that the boys should be street musicians as well as thieves and we were off. Your play features characters that break the fourth wall could you share some of your thoughts that went into this artistic decision? (Perhaps there were other plays that featured a similar element that inspired you? Students who come to our shows
NEIL BARTLETT Neil was an early member of Complicite, collaborating on their Perrier-Award-winning More Bigger Snacks Now in 1985. From 1988 1998 he worked as part of Gloria, a music-theatre collective with whom he created thirteen original pieces including the semi-legendary Sarrasine, A Judgement in Stone (with Sheila Hancock), A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, and The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin. He also staged theatre pieces for the Derby Playhouse (The School for Wives, 1989), the Royal Court (Night After Night, 1993) and the National Theatre In London (The Game of Love and Chance,1992) . In 1994 he was controversially appointed Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Over the next eleven years he staged twentynine productions including radical reevaluations of Shakespeare, Moliere, Kleist, Marivaux,Genet, Maugham, Wilde and Rattigan alongside populist Christmas shows and collaborations with Robert Lepage and Improbable Theatre . In 2001 he was awarded an OBE for his work at the Lyric. Since 2005 his work has included; his first opera production, a new staging of The Rakes Progress for the Aldeburgh Festival in 2006; Christopher Marlowes Dido Queen of Carthage at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston; a transfer of his staging of Oliver Twist from Boston to off-Broadway and The Berkeley Rep; a staging of his own new translation of Genets The Maids for the Brighton Festival; a Twelfth Night for the Royal Shakespeare Company with John Lithgow as Malvolio; a site-specific performance based on Wladislaw Szpilmans The Pianist with concert pianist Mikhail Rudy for the first Manchester International Festival and a new staging of Oscar Wildes An Ideal Husband for the Abbey, Irelands National Theatre. As well as being a director, Bartlett also works as a playwright, translator and author. His adaptations of Moliere, Marivaux and of Dickens (Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations) in particular have been performed throughout the world; his play In Extremis, commissioned for Corin Redgrave to mark the centenary of Oscar Wildes death, was premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2000. His solo performance pieces have recently been collected in the volume Solo Voices. His first book, Who Was That Man? (1988), was a polemic study of Wilde; he has also published acclaimed three novels; Ready to catch him should he fall (1990), Mr Clive and Mr Page (1996) and, most recently, Skin Lane, which was nominated for the Costa Award in 2007. His future theatre projects include collaboration with Justin Bond and a major new commission for the second Manchester International Festival in 2009. Neils website is www. neil-bartlett.com.
Set design by Kurt Boetcher.
often read Our Town, which features a narrator do you feel the treatment of the narration in Twist is similar, and if so how?) Dickens tells his stories in order to affect people he talks directly to the reader all the time. So for me it would be inconceivable to have a staging which didnt do this. Also the adaptation was created first time round for alate nineteenth century theatre, an actual melodrama playhouse the Lyric Hammersmith in which the audience is very close to the actors, the kind of theatre which invites that communication. Twist is a very involving story its about provoking extremes of sympathy and horror. We knew right from the start that the narrator would be the company not a solitary, distanced figure, but a company of very engaged actors. Dickens narration is not cool it is hot, angry, comic, demanding engagement and a shared response. In your work with Twist, did you research Dickens own life? To what extent do you think does Dickens personal biography affect his view of children as depicted in Twist? All of Dickens work is very autobiographi-
cal, but Twist especially so. His feelings of abandonment are expressed in a very extreme form (even more so than in Great Expectations). He transforms his own experience of being abandoned in London by his parents into a weird parallel experience in which an abandoned orphan is offered two wildly differing surrogate families the good family of the Brownlows, and the dark family of Fagin. Those families are the families of the dream and of nightmare....Fagin, in a way, is the mother Oliver never had.... This play brings to light some of the socalled underbelly of Dickensian London what fascinates you about this world? I love underbellies. Underbellies are what we go the theatre for we can get nice at home. Dickens takes hopes and fears that we can all share the most primary ones there can be and acts them out in the darkest possible land of the imagination. But his great trick is tomake us believethat the world of Twist is not merely a surreal one, or merely a social realist one; the image of the child in peril is real on both levels.
Staging Dickens: Making A New Stage Version of Oliver Twist

Program notes by Neil Bartlett
Oliver amazed at the Dodgers mode of going to work.
Fagin in the condemned cell. Illustrations are by George Cruikshank from the 1836 edition of Oliver Twist.
Any new stage version of a story which the audience feels they not only know but own before the curtain even rises has to do two apparently contradictory things. It has to deliver all the famous bits (so that no one feels short-changed), but also has to make the audience feel that they are encountering the story anew, afresh; that they are hearing and seeing things which they either never knew or had forgotten were there. The first decision taken in making this adaptation was that it would be made out of Dickens original language and nothing but. With the exception of one or two short phrases necessitated by the telescoping of the novels plot, this is a decision which has been abided by. Indeed, the extraordinary energy and volatility, the sadistic black comedy and sheer dramatic guts of Dickens actual sentences are the raisons dtre of
this piece. Returning to the original words even for the singing in the show was the main way in which I hoped to avoid any bowdlerization of the tale. I wanted the show to be as alarming, as compelling and as wickedly comic as Dickens words are. Of course, which words I have chosen to include, and which words I have chosen to omit, reveal what I personally care most about in this story. I hope. The Question of Tone It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodrama, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon. The hero sinks upon his bed, weighed down by misfortune; the next scene regales the audience with comic song.
Oliver Twist, Chapter 17
What do we mean by the word Dickensian? Not, I think, simply subject matter taken from the lower depths of urban poverty. Rather, I think we mean a distinctive way of dramatizing what is seen. The first nineteenth-century stagings of Oliver Twist some made even before the final parts of the original, serialized novel had been published have scripts of quite extraordinary ferocity and brevity. One of them gets the whole proceedings down to thirty handwritten pages, and still finds time for plenty of rambling low comedy from the Bumbles. They all seek to unashamedly achieve one objective, namely, to rouse the audience. To achieve this end, they employ the most remarkable combinations of comedy with horror, satire with sentiment. They demand that the audience enjoys the most alarming leaps of dramatic tone. They are also very fond of (and good at) employing those most powerful forms of theatrical shorthand, the baldly stated moral, the tableau and the melodrama. In doing all of this they are of course entirely in keeping with Dickens own dramatic and dramatizing instincts in Oliver Twist.
family for its orphan hero. Every scene in the book can be read in this light; every character too. In the absence of Olivers mother, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry even Noah Claypole and Charlotte all attempt, in their various twisted ways, to mother him. Fagin and Mr. Brownlow, in their archetypically opposite worlds, construct surrogate families for Oliver. Everyone (even Mr. Grimwig) is convinced that they know the right way for the boy to live. All of these conflicting dreams of family life, so deeply rooted in their creators own childhood, are powerful; Nancys dream of a possible home for Oliver her determination that he will have the childhood she knows has been stolen from her is so fierce, that it kills her. In editing Dickens labyrinthine plot, I wanted to arrive at a script whose economy would encourage the actors to concentrate on trying to get back to the blunt realities of the original cast-list. Nancy is, after all, a teenage prostitute with a violent owner, not a musical-comedy star; the boys Fagin says he finds sleeping rough at Kings Cross are very like the teenagers who still sleep rough there; Bill is a violent housebreaker, and a coward; Fagin is Jewish, and his vicious rage is that of someone who lives excluded from everything we might conceivably call society.
Dickens is, paradoxically, the most serious of writers, in that he takes this task of engaging us, his audience, with such wholehearted seriousness. I wanted to create an adaptation that would not shy away Some of the events of the great final from this seriousness, but rather working-out of the story may surprise relish it; that would demand of its audiences who only know it from actors they engage with their audifilms. Ive kept what for me is the Illustration of a Peddlar, by Gustav Dore. ence above all else. This is why the greatest and strangest scene of the script does not try to shift Dickens book, where, on the night before his into some solid or polite middle ground of dialoguedeath, Fagin goes mad with terror, and in his madness based, psychologised literary theatre, but lets his story realises that Oliver is somehow the cause of all this. Ive taken Mr. Brownlow and Rose seriously. Ive dared move alarmingly (demandingly) through all its intensely felt and highly coloured original shifts of theatrical tone. to kill off not just Nancy and Bill, but Fagin and the It is only when melodrama is allowed to rub shoulders Dodger, as Dickens does. Ive even dared to believe, as with psychodrama, when sensationalism combines with Dickens did, that after all the strange violent parodies fierce and socially committed satire, that you arrive in of family life that claim him the brutal workhouse the particular world of the dramatic imagination that we of the Bumbles, the gothic funeral-parlour of the can only describe with the tautology Dickensian. Sowerberries, the nightmare inversion of all maternal values in Fagins den the motherless Olivers destiny The Plot is the one we must all, despite our evidence to the contrary, believe in: safety. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Miss Prism, The Importance of Being Earnest
This is a story with a single over-riding desire; to find a
Oliver with a Twist

by Sarah Ollove
A scene from the London production, directed by Neil Bartlett.
Theatre Lore
What is a raked stage? Where do the terms upstage and downstage originate? Historically, stages were built on inclines, with the backs of the stages slightly higher than the fronts. The incline was called a rake and helped those in the back of the audience see the action onstage. Eventually, theatres started placing seats on inclines instead of stages, but the terminology stuck. Downstage is the front of the stage, closest to the audience, and upstage is the back of the stage. Some theatres, like A Noise Within, still participate in the tradition of using raked stages.
Midway through the first scene of a staged adaptation of Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens lay down on the floor of his box and refused to rise until the curtain. Childish? Perhaps. But Dickens saw this production in 1838. The final installment of the novel, published serially in Bentleys Miscellany, appeared in April 1839. George Almars Oliver Twist, a Serio-Comic Burletta was one of ten adaptations presented before Dickenss last chapter reached the public. The Victorians could not wait to see how the story ends. Who could blame them? As the production history of Oliver Twist indicates, Dickens inspired the stage as much as the Victorian theatre influenced Dickens. Dickens savored the theatre. In school he attended the Theatre Royal at Rochester, puppet-mastered melodramas in a toy theatre, and wrote a tragedy entitled Misnar, the Sultan of India. Searching for a career, he flirted with acting, landing that impossibility of all impossibilities an audition at Covent Garden Theatre, which he missed, citing illness. Even as his career turned to writing, Dickens stayed close to his early love. An avid theatre-goer, he garnered high esteem as an actor in amateur productions for charity, and watching the audiences response to public readings of his novels remained one of his chief delights. These continued until the end of his life, despite orders from his doctor to cease because when he read certain passages like Sikes murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, his pulse skyrocketed. Compared to other literary genres, by the nineteenth century the novel had barely reached puberty and suffered growing pains. It struggled to balance the private experience of novel reading with the theatres heritage of public entertainment. In Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre, Deborah Vlock writes the drama was not supplanted by the novel in the nineteenth century, but merged with it, enabling the novel to exist. Many novelists including Jane Austen, looked to theatrical conventions as models for their own work. Dickens was no exception. When Dickens first arrived in London, only three theatres in the city possessed charters to produce legally five act comedies or tragedies. That didnt stop cunning entrepreneurs from founding unlicensed theatres, but the law restricted them to musical drama especially the popular burletta, a one-act farce with a minimum of five songs. The concept of the burletta eventually expanded to include operettas, burlesque, revues, and the melodrama. All these genres relied heavily on music to set the tone, and all mixed the grotesque with the comic.
The novel attempted to find a balance between the private experience of a reader and the idea of public entertainment. Like many other novelists of his day, Dickenss works read as if meant for a group, not just as a private pastime. Reading aloud was a common pastime in Victorian London, where illiteracy ruled. Around Dickenss study hung mirrors angled towards his face so that the writer could watch his own reactions to his work. If he laughed, a drawing room party might laugh; if a tear came to his eye, ladies might weep. In addition, many novels appeared serially in newspapers prior to their completion. This allowed an author to test the waters before completing a long work. Like an actor adapting his performance based upon audiences reactions, the novelist had ample opportunity to change his novel based on the reception of the first parts. Dickens even changed the end of Great Expectations to please the public. The Victorian Englishman has a reputation as repressed, but his taste in entertainment was filled with emotion. Melodrama reigned as king of the Victorian Stage. Scenes of heightened tragedy alternated with low comedy, and music intensified emotions. Visual imagery and stage machinery often upstaged dialogue. When the modern audience thinks about melodrama, images of a beautiful, pale woman, swooning in the arms of a handsome also pale gentleman come to mind. No one envisions the following scene, in which the fat servant of the distressed woman gets his foot stuck in a pickle jar. But the absurdity of the humor throws the tragedy into sharp relief, heightening the impact of both. One sees the influence of melodrama in many of the great nineteenth century novelists from Balzac to Dostoyevsky. No one recognized melodramas merits more than Dickens. Although the novels he wrote immediately before and after it have actors as important characters, Oliver Twist remains remarkably devoid of references to the theatre. He only writes of it in one passage of Oliver Twist: It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the
tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon. Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on, which makes a vast difference. However, the stage infuses every part of the novels form. Dickens knew that melodrama followed the quick jumps in tone that occur in life. This was a priceless recognition for a novelist adept at both pathos and wit. Like the melodramas, Dickens always captured accurately the ebullience and exhaustion of living. Dickens also learned valuable lessons from another popular theatre of his day, the pantomime. The English pantomime inherited its theatrical tradition from the harlequinade of the Italian commedia dellarte. Most pantomimes silently acted the same familiar story of two lovers, a fat father, an undesirable suitor, a clever servant, and plenty of clownish henchmen. The father and suitor make so much trouble for the lovers that it seems impossible for them to marry, until a good fairy enters and wins the day for love. These stock characters act predictably from scene to scene and play to play. Physical traits, and repeated tics, not psychological motives dictate actions. The external must convey all information; pantomime does not allow characters words. Dickens enjoyed the pantomime, writing: A pantomime is to us, a mirror of life. Dickens believed in the line All the worlds a stage, Shakespeare really meant: all the worlds a pantomime. Dickens learned much from pantomime characters. Several pantomime characters became stock characters for Dickens the ingnue, the meddling father, the unwanted suitor. Even those characters that do not come directly from pantomime behave like pantomime characters. Amazingly, Dickens avoids flat characters a dangerous pratfall of archetypes. Of course, Dickens granted his characters the gift of speech, and so, unlike the chime-
Young Philip joins a School of Crossing Sweepers a scene from Dickens London.
rical pantomime lovers, Oliver Twist, Nancy Sikes and the other dramatis personae hover between realism and fantasy. Fagin exemplifies the pantomime traits of Dickenss characters. An archetype of the seedy underbelly of Victorian England, Fagin also represents another stereotype the greedy, amoral Jew. Dickens was hardly the first to take advantage of this stereotype for his villains. He descended from a long line of Englishmen including Marlowe and Shakespeare who drew upon cultural stereotypes to create monstrous Jews who leered at innocent children. In 1863, a woman named Eliza Davies, the wife of a Jewish banker, read Oliver Twist, and liked it very much, except for Fagin. She wrote a letter objecting to the characterization. Dickenss reply suggests he never considered that Fagin might be taken as a representation for a whole group of people and got defensive: I must take leave to say that if there be any general feeling on the part of the intelligent Jewish people that I have done to them what you describe as a great wrong, they are a far less sensible, a far less just and a far less good tempered people than I have always supposed them to be. Later in the letter, he invites Mrs. Davies to see what he has made of her criticism in his next novel, Our Mutual Friend. Perhaps as way of apology, Dickens endowed the Jew in this novel, Riah, with an almost superhuman goodness, the exact opposite of
Fagin. Though most of his characters were archetypes, Dickens did not want people to mistake his characters for generalizations of ethnicity. His characters are archetypes, not stereotypes. In the nineteenth century, the novel soared to new heights while the theatre foundered. The stage could not ignore the emergence of the novel, nor should it, given such a valuable source of new material. The novel influenced the theatre at a time when the theatre needed it, and Dickenss keen understanding of dramatic form allowed him to make a major contribution. Edmund Wilson heralded Dickens as the greatest dramatic writer the English had since Shakespeare. At a time when dramatic writers in London had hit a dry spell, Dickens breathed new life into a dying genre. Adapting novels for the stage was inevitable but fraught with difficulties, both artistic and commercial. Dickens might have overreacted to Almars burletta, but it was the only action he could take. He had no legal recourse to protect his work. As his career evolved, so did the idea of the professional writer. When he wrote Oliver Twist, the rights of the novelist to own his work were shaky. Adaptations at this time spurred an examination of intellectual property and copyright. A bad adaptation could end the career of a fledgling writer, effectively curtailing his changes of rising in society. In a culture in which everyone attended the theatre, a good adaptation launched a writer successfully towards respectability.
Dickens feared bad adaptations for more reasons than his social status. In a letter about an adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, he lists his concerns: My general objection to the adaptation of any unfinished work of mine simply is, that being badly done and worse acted it tends to vulgarize the characters, to destroy or weaken in the minds of those who see them the impressions I have endeavored to create, and consequently lessen the afterinterest in their progress. Artistically Dickens worried that audiences, content with the ending offered by the adaptor, would not read the ending he wrote. Because Dickens often ended his novels after seeing several adaptations, he might well have altered his endings based on what he saw, complicating his process enormously. Furthermore, he grew concerned that adaptors would cheapen his novels, sacrificing artistic merit for the crass success of star actor-managers. Despite his reservations about losing control of his work, Dickenss enthusiasm for the theatre never diminished. This ardor embraced good adaptations of his novels. In the same letter, he writes that no objection can exist for a moment where the [adaptation] is so admirably done in every respect. At one point, he even suggested that he might undertake the task himself. This idea never panned out, but Dickens relished the audiences public reaction to his text. He claimed that his novels had more power read aloud, though he liked his own readings best. Actors found the roles in Oliver Twist irresistible. Actresses playing young, orphaned boys could pack a theatre faster than anything else in Victorian London. Many actresses made a career of it because the impoverished boy outlasted an actressess looks. Likewise, the role of Bill Sikes enticed countless actors, hoping to find fame as great villains including Sir Henry Irving. Though only Dickenss second novel, Oliver Twist remained the most frequently dramatized throughout his life, despite the fact that no less of an authority than William Charles Macready Covent Gardens leading man felt the material unsuitable for
dramatization. Macready cited the breadth of scope in the novel as an insurmountable obstacle. The Victorians clearly disagreed. By 1870 at least 100 different Olivers had met nine dozen Artful Dodgers. Most adaptations took the form of a burletta including the requisite number of songs a tradition of staging the novel that led directly to Lionel Barts Oliver! However, the burletta was not the only theatrical genre to use the story of the orphan boy. Oliver and his comrades were popular characters in the toy theatre in which the characters were made from mass produced sheets of paper and sold with paper proscenium, sets, and props. In the early twentieth century, burlesques were made satirizing both the material and the production history including Oliver Twist; or Dickens up a Tree and Oliver Twisted. Throughout its long production history, Oliver Twist endured many shifts in theatrical taste. Initially, productions slavishly recreated tableau based upon original illustrations from the novel, commissioning sets from men who staked their reputations on exact replicas. These all but disappeared until the rise of film. The role of Oliver passed from the hands of women to young men and boys. Oliver Twist weathered method acting, radio, film, and the musical, all of which took to the material as fast as the Victorians. If in 1838, Dickens had been granted the foresight to see what would happen to his novel, he might have refused to get up from the floor of the box. However, being but mortal, Dickens did rise, and wrote some of the most beloved novels in English. Dickens owes not a little of his success to theatre. Without the example of the stage and without its help in spreading his popularity, he would never have stood so high.
Sarah Ollove is a dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./ MXAT Institute.
Vocabulary from Oliver Twist
Extant Dodger refers to the play as ..the most concise and faithful specimen of dramatic biography extant. Here, extant means in existence. Fascinator Mr. Bumbles pet name for Mrs. Corney perhaps he simply means that she fascinates him. The word has a double meaning, as it also referred to a scarf of crochet work, lace, or the like, narrowing toward the ends, worn as a head covering by women. Fence A receiver of stolen goods, who usually resells them. Green Charley refers to Oliver as green, meaning that he is brand new to the pick-pocketing world and thus entirely uneducated about it. Gruel A thin porridge cereal, usually oatmeal, which is boiled in either water or milk. Hot gin and water A drink introduced by the British East India Trading company related to the modern gin and tonic, which contains carbonated water. This would have been hot water mixed with gin, lemon, and perhaps a bit of cinnamon. Taken as a nightcap before bedtime. Insatiable Not satiable; incapable of being satisfied or appeased: insatiable hunger for knowledge. Liberal terms Mr. Bumble wishes to sell Oliver and indicates by using the phrase liberal terms that he is open to negotiations about price. Magistrate A civil enforcer of the law similar to a judge.
Affablest Most affable: most pleasant and easy to talk to. Avaricious Avaricious, covetous, greedy, rapacious share the sense of desiring to possess more of something than one already has or might in normal circumstances be entitled to. Avaricious often implies a pathological, driven greediness for money or other valuables and usually suggests a concomitant miserliness. Charity-boy A boy who attends a charity-supported school. Covetous Inordinately or wrongly desirous of wealth or possessions; greedy. Covey Man or friend; also appearing as cove in reference to Mr. Brownlow. Crib Slang used during Dickens time referred to a house as a crib, exactly as in modern day hip-hop music.
Melancholy Refers to one of the four humours melancholy is the condition of having too much black bile, considered in ancient and medieval medicine to cause gloominess and depression. Morrice Figurative command to hurry up. It is from morrice, a variant spelling of morris, a type of lively dance in England. Owdacious Mrs. Corney refers to Oliver as an owdacious young savage. One can only conclude that she means audacious which is defined as recklessly brave or daring. Parochial Prentiss An apprentice to the parish, as Oliver Twist is in the beginning of the play. Peach To tattle on someone is to peach on them. Pentonville A pleasant middle to upper-class suburb of northwest London. Plummy and slam This term is an underworld slang phrase used by thieves to communicate that the coast was clear. Now, then! cried a voice from below, in reply to a whistle from the Dodger. Plummy and slam! was the reply. This seemed to be some watchword or signal that all was right; for the light of a feeble candle gleamed on the wall at the remote end of the passage; and a mans face peeped out, from where a balustrade of the old kitchen staircase had been broken away. Procure To get or obtain by purchasing. Scarpering To scarper is to flee or depart suddenly, esp. without having paid ones bills. Solomon Grunday, tried on Friday, tonight is Sunday, gallows on Monday Fagin recites a 19th century nursery rhyme written in 1842 by James Orchard HalliwellPhillipps about the life of Solomon Grundy. The poem is a riddle and appears to take place in the process of a single week. In
the poem, each days events represent the seven ages of man. The term seven ages of man is derived from Shakespeares As You Like It, and are defined as: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and second childhood. Stripes and Bruises Mr. Bumble uses this phrase to indicate the red lash marks that result from a whipping and the accompanying bruises. Traps Policemen. Togs Clothes Workhus This mean-spirited nickname comes from contracting the two words work and house. Noah uses this name for Oliver, referring to his status as a lowly workhouse orphan.
Theatre Lore
Why is it bad luck to say Macbeth inside the theatre? There are many origins for this superstition. Old actors believe the witches song in Macbeth to possess the uncanny power of casting evil spells. The reasons for this fear usually bring tales of accidents and ill-fortunes that have plagued productions of the play throughout the world. An alternative is that the superstition began in the days of stock companies, which would struggle to remain in business. Frequently, near the end of a season, a company would realize it was not going to break even, and, in an attempt to boost ticket sales, would announce the production of a crowd favorite: Macbeth. If times were particularly bad, the play would frequently be a portent of the companys demise.
VISUAL ARTS: Creating the World of Oliver Twist

George Cruikshank (September 27, 1792 - February 1, 1878) is a noted illustrator and caricaturist who was commissioned to produce a series of depictions for the first publication of Oliver Twist. Born into a family of noted caricaturists and artists, Cruikshanks father was Scottish painter Isaac Cruikshank. Cruikshank was renowned for his social and political caricatures of English life, and was published frequently in popular publications such as The Comic Almanack and Omnibus. His career spanned 60 years, and placed him at the center of many noted controversies. Among these were his claim to have guided plot elements and the development of Oliver Twist himself, his lampooning of the British monarchy, and his open hostility towards political foes of Britain including Ireland and China. Cruikshanks lampoons of the monarchy were so infamous that in 1820, Cruikshank was supposed to have received a bribe from the royal family of George III of 100 pounds for his pledge not to caricature His Majesty in any immoral situation. Cruikshank personified Britain in the recurring cartoon character John Bull whom he developed with assistance from James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, two other wellknown British satirical artists. John Bull can be somewhat compared to Uncle Sam in the U.S. in terms of his personification of the nation, but his status as a lowly yeoman (rather than political figure) and preference for beer and simple pleasures draw him in stark contrast. Both John Bull and Uncle Sam cartoons were used to gather support for military recruitment to varying degrees of success.
Please, sir, I want some more. Illustration by George Cruikshank, 1837
In creating the scenic design for Oliver Twist, designer Kurt Boetcher considered influential artists from the period before and during the time of Dickens. Boetchers major design influences were tied closely to the industrial revolution: Early in the design process my research focused on the British workhouses that thrived in England from as early as the 1600s all the way through the 1800s. I was drawn to the industrial architecture and materials of the period. The textures and colors of these environments heavily influenced the design and color palette of this production. The harshness of the steel, concrete, heavy beams, and filthy working conditions that the workhouse inhabitants would endure in Dickensian England. I also found visual inspiration in some of the etchings and lithographs from the 1800s, including the original etchings of George Cruikshank that appeared in the first published editions of Oliver Twist. The simple and spare images depict a lonely world, dimly lit and full of shadows. I also found some research into Pollocks toy theatres to be interesting. Boetcher and Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott worked to remain true to the original novel and its depiction of the nightmarish existence of Oliver as he searches desperately for a family. The world of Oliver Twist is an inherently theatrical one. It is a menacing, scary, harsh world like the nightmare of a child who suffers every imaginable cruelty. Because of the accelerated pace of the adaptation, the design needed to allow the action to move
seamlessly from location to location. The episodic nature of the text leads to abrupt shifts and leaps of dramatic tone from comedy to horror to satire to sentimentality. According to RodriguezElliott, The production stresses the actor-driven, page-turning drama of the piece. It does not shy away from the cruelty that Oliver Twist endures, but at the end of the play Oliver is safe at last. There is hope. The adaptation is by design very theatrical, and Bartlett takes it a step further by having the actors play multiple roles and create the world of the play in collusion with the audience. All roles are played by adults adults play children, men play women, women play men. The production stresses the shifts of tone in a rather bold and dramatic way using music, actor-driven soundscapes and a cappella singing. It pushes the idea that we are in a theatre and these are actors, making the audience very often aware of that fact as actors transform right before their eyes, putting on a wig, changing costumes etc. Reinforcing this concept is the design, where we see a backstage area with all the trappings ghost lights, ladders, show curtain, follow spots, footlights, rehearsal furniture and ropes and the objects transform to serve the various locations throughout the play. There are also certain Victorian references that combined with the objects giving us a sense of time and place. Olivers world is uncertain the sole element of consistency comes from his innocence and purity. For this reason, the set design is unmasked. According to Boetcher, We chose to remove all of the masking and curtains from the stage so that the world of the play would feel strangely spare and a bit unsettling. We further enhanced this mood with extreme lighting angles and sharp shadows cast through the skeletal scenic elements. The floor treatment is taken from the industrial harshness and cruelty of the workhouses. The lighting instruments that live on the set are a fusion of a Victorian period street
lamp, and a traditional theater ghost light. We wanted to audience to be constantly reminded that they are in a theater watching a group of actors putting on a show. In enhancing this idea, we wanted to expose as much of the behind the scenes activity as we could having the actors perform the simple scene changes in front of the audience while others change costumes and get into character... all while the audience watches. Suggested Activities 1. The design for Oliver Twist draws upon the work of caricaturist George Cruikshank who depicted political figures and the plight of children during the industrial revolution. Have students produce a series of small caricatures based on real-life subjects that, to them, represent a modern view of childhood. Encourage students to use irony in their work by featuring the juxtaposition of polarized themes, contrasting color values, complementary colors, and tonal and textural opposites. 2. Uncle Sam collage: Gather representations of Uncle Sam in political cartoons, on-line resources, newspapers, postcards, posters, and 3-dimensional items like lapel pins or clothing. Incorporate American iconic images such as flags, military vehicles, photographic material of the U.S. and its people, and current political campaign materials. Ask students to create a collage which incorporate a single point of view about a current social or cultural issue as it relates to the figure of Uncle Sam. For example, a student may choose to depict Uncle Sam as related to social issues of violence in schools, teen pregnancy, or environmental conservation. The work may use Uncle Sam as outside observer, providing commentary about an issue that is of personal concern for the student. As a group, ask students to share their artwork and articulate their perspective to the class, noting the ways in which the current social, economic, and political contexts influenced their interpretation of the iconic figure of Uncle Sam.
CA VISUAL ARTS STANDARDS: Grades 9-12 Proficient: Creative Expression 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, Historical and Cultural Context 3.0, 3.3, Aesthetic Valuing 4.0, 4.1-3, 4.5.
Uncle Sam recruiting poster, painted by James Montgomery Flagg 1916-17.
John Bull World War I Recruiting Poster, 1915.
The Music of Oliver Twist
Featuring Composer David O

David O is a composer, performer, and musical director whose work has been featured at Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Kennedy Center, The Mark Taper Forum, and the Hollywood Bowl, as well as other venues in Los Angeles and around the world. His concert compositions include the critically-acclaimed A Map of Los Angeles (commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale), Elements, and Dadme.His original musicals for families include Imagine (South Coast Rep), The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, The Legend of Alex (Center Theatre Groups P.L.A.Y. program), and Atalanta (based on the story from Free to Be You and Me). Other compositions for the theatre include his award-winning scores for Hippolytos and Ubu Roi (at A Noise Within). Many Los Angeles children and their parents know David as The Professor for his performances in Summersounds at the Hollywood Bowl, produced by the LA Philharmonic. His credits as Musical Director include the world premieres of Toy Story: The Musical and Jason Robert Browns 13, and the West Coast premieres of Michael John LaChiusas The Wild Party and Little Fish.
In most forms of entertainment, music plays the role of directing the emotions of the viewer. Whether the medium is film, theater or video games, music is in the background helping the viewer to emotionally interpret the images in front of them. In Oliver Twist, the music will emotionally reflect what is going on inside the characters minds. The music will also mirror the world of the play as conveyed by the sets, lighting design, props, and costumes. Composer David O describes the overarching artistic vision that guided his process for creating the music for the play: The score for Oliver Twist is special to me in that it is almost entirely actor-driven, with the live actors in the piece creating much of the music and sound live in the theater, as opposed to recorded music cues that are played back. Some of the music is sung, and some takes the form of percussive sounds, played by the actors, on traditional percussion instruments as well as non-traditional found objects. We are also using a solo violinist in the room to help set the mood of many of the moments in the show. My melodic influences for the sung music and the violin parts include traditional English folk tunes and hymns. My influences for the percussion instruments include the work of 20th Century composers such as John Cage and Frank Zappa, as well as the tradition of foley sound effects (live sound effects, such as those created for early radio dramas). In working with Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, David O made crucial decisions that guided the music for Oliver Twist. These decisions took into account the way the actors move onstage and relate to the audience:
In my early meetings with the Director, we discussed the importance of using music to accentuate the harshness of Dickens story. Throughout Neil Bartletts adaptation, the action of the play shifts immediately from traditional theater to direct audience address to choral speaking to tableau to song, sometimes several times within a scene. We decided early on that the music should likewise include many disparate elements, jarring in the transition from one to another, to accentuate these unexpected theatrical turns. In many instances, we are using music to add irony to the performance for example, in moments when Oliver is in the abusive grasp of Fagin and his street gang, the violin may be playing sweet, sentimental melodies, as if to suggest he is instead in the loving embrace of a family. The sets, costumes, and environment of Oliver Twist also influenced David Os compositions. The visual design of the play involves a stark theatricality, accentuated by Victorian details: The music lives in a similar world. While not specifically Victorian, the music pulls elements from a Victorian aesthetic to create a stark texture of melody and percussive sound. In creating the percussive score for the actors to play, I am using three major elements: first, the sounds of bells (workhouse bells, wind chimes, clock tower bells), second, the sounds of wood (empty bowls, coffins, knocking on doors, clocks ticking), third, whistling (the secret calls of Fagins gang in the streets). ACTIVITIES
Analyze and Respond Critically: Compare the text from the English Folk tune The Sally Gardens to the text from Oliver Twist. How does the language of each song convey the mood of the piece? Each song takes the listener on a journey of sorts what similarities do you see between where each song begins and where it ends? Does the main subject of each song start and end in a similar place? What differences do you observe? From Oliver Twist: There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast; Even when that something is but one wretched breathless boy; As he pants with exhaustion, they chase him without rest; And as his strength decreases, and the crowd gains upon him, they whoop and scream with joy. The Salley Gardens: Down by the Salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the Salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I being young and foolish, with her would not agree. In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. Found Object Symphony: Using the idea of foley, have students
design a score for their own mini-version of Oliver Twist using found objects and sounds they can make using their body as an instrument. A. Gather together trash cans, pencils, paper, sheets of plastic transparencies, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles half-filled with water, and anything that makes an interesting sound. Have each student (or a group of students working together,) compose a Found Object Symphony using their classmates to play the objects they select as they conduct. Make sure each piece has a beginning, middle, and end. B. For a more advanced Found Object Symphony, ask students to craft their pieces to cleave to the general outline of Oliver Twist as follows: 1. Oliver asks for more at the Orphanage 2. Oliver gets locked in the coffin 3. Oliver attempts his first robbery with Fagins gang 4. Oliver is taken to Brownlows 5. Olivers true identity is discovered
Bibliography/Resources
The Industrial Revolution, 1700-1900. DISCovering World History. 1997 Student Resource Center. Framington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group. Online Database. November 8, 2001. Bloy, Marjorie. The Corn Laws. The Victorian Web. http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/ victorian/history/cornlaws1.html. 25 August 2003. C.A. Beard. Industrial Revolution (excerpt). DISCovering World History. 1997. Student Resource Center. Framington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group. Online Database. November 8, 2001. Cameron, Eleanor. McLuhan, Youth, and Literature, Part I. The Horn Book Virtual History Exhibit. 2 November 2006. <http://www.hbook.com/Exhibit/article_cameron1.html>. (Source on-line.) Campbell, Joseph. Hero With a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Deane, Phyllis. The First Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1965. Factory Working Conditions in the Late 1800s, 1880-1899. DISCovering U.S. History. 1997. Student Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group. Online Database November 8, 2001. Henly, Patricia. The Hummingbird House. Denver: McMurray and Beck, 1999. Hourihan, Margery. Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Childrens Literature. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pike, Royston. Hard Times. New York, Washington: Frederick A Praeger. 1966. McCaslin, Nellie. Creative Drama in the Classroom and Beyond. 8th Ed. Boston: Pearson Education, 2006. Perdue, David. David Purdues Charles Dickens page. http://charlesdickenspage.com/index. html. Plato. Wikipedia.org. 24 October 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato>. (Source on-line.) Reuther, Rosemary Radford. New Woman New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Victorian Web. A resource website written and edited by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History at Brown University. http://www.victorianweb.org/.
About Theatre Arts
Theatre Vocabulary Being an Audience Member

Today, movies and television take audiences away from what was once the number one form of entertainment: going to the theatre. But attending a live performance is still one of the most thrilling and active forms of spending time. In a theatre, observers are catapulted into the action, especially at an intimate venue like A Noise Within, whose thrust stage reaches out into the audience and whose actors can see, hear, and feel the response of the crowd. Although in the past playhouses could sometimes be rowdy, today participating in the performance by giving respect and attention to the actors is the most appropriate behavior at a theatrical performance. Shouting out or even whispering can be heard throughout the auditorium, as can rustling paper or ringing phones. After A Noise Withins performance of Oliver Twist, you will have the opportunity to discuss the plays content and style with the performing artists and directors. You may wish to remind students to observe the performance carefully or to compile questions ahead of time so they are prepared to participate in the discussion.
These terms will be included in pre- and post-performance discussions at A Noise Within.
blocking: The instructions a director gives his actors that tell them how and where to move in relation to each other or to the set in a particular scene. character: The personality or part portrayed by an actor on stage. conflict: The opposition of people or forces which causes the plays rising action. dramatic irony: A dramatic technique used by a writer in which a character is unaware of something the audience knows. genre: Literally, kind or type. In literary terms, genre refers to the main types of literary form, principally comedy and tragedy. It can also refer to forms that are more specific to a given historical era, such as the revenge tragedy, or to more specific sub-genres of tragedy and comedy such as the comedy of manners, farce or social drama. motivation: The situation or mood which initiates an action. Actors often look for their motivation when they try to dissect how a character thinks or acts. props: Items carried on stage by an actor to represent objects mentioned in or implied by the script. Sometimes the props are actual, sometimes they are manufactured in the theatre shop. proscenium stage: There is usually a front curtain on a proscenium stage. The audience views the play from the front through a frame called the proscenium arch. In this scenario, all audience members have the same view of the actors. set: The physical world created on stage in which the action of the play takes place. setting: The environment in which a play takes place. It may include the historical period as well as the physical space. stage areas: The stage is divided into areas to help the director to note where action will take place. Upstage is the area furthest from the audience. Downstage is the area closest to the audience. Center stage defines the middle of the playing space. Stage left is the actors left as he faces the audience. Stage right is the actors right as he faces the audience. theme: The overarching message or main idea of a literary or dramatic work. A recurring idea in a play or story. thrust stage: A stage that juts out into the audience seating area so that patrons are seated on three sides. In this scenario, audience members see the play from varying viewpoints. A Noise Within features a thrust stage.
About A Noise Within

A Noise Withins mission is to produce the great works of world drama in rotating repertory, with a company of professional, classically- trained actors. A Noise Within educates the public through comprehensive outreach efforts and conservatory training programs that foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of historys greatest plays and playwrights. As the only company in southern California working in the repertory tradition (rotating productions using a resident ensemble of professional, trained artists), A Noise Within is dedicated solely to producing classical literature from authors such as Shakespeare, Molire, Ibsen, Shaw, and Euripides. The company was formed in 1991 by founders Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, both of whom were classically trained at the acclaimed American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. They envisioned A Noise Within after recognizing a lack of professional, classical productions and education in Southern California and sought out and assembled their own company of actors to meet the need. All of A Noise Withins resident artists have been classically trained, and many hold Master of Fine Arts degrees from some of the nations most respected institutions, such as Juilliard, Yale, and the American Conservatory Theatre. In its fourteen-year history, A Noise Within has garnered over 500 awards and commendations, including the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circles revered Polly Warfield Award for Excellence and the coveted Margaret Hartford Award for Sustained Excellence. In 2004, A Noise Within accepted an invitation to collaborate with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a tandem performance of A Midsummer Nights Dream at the Hollywood Bowl. More than 25,000 individuals attend productions at A Noise Within, annually, and between performances at the theatre and touring productions, the company draws 13,000 student participants to its arts education programs every year. Students benefit from in-school workshops, conservatory training, and an internship program, as well as subsidized tickets to matinee and evening performances, discussions with artists, and state standardscompliant study guides. Study Guides A Noise Within creates California standards-compliant study guides to help educators prepare their students for their visit to our theatre. Study guides are available at no extra cost to download through our website: www.anoisewithin. org. All of the information and activities outlined in these guides are designed to work in compliance with Visual and Performing Arts, English Language, and other subject standards as set forth by the state of California. Study guides include background information on the plays and playwrights, historical context, textual analysis, in-depth discussion of A Noise Withins artistic interpretation of the work, interviews with directors and designers, as well as discussion points and suggested classroom activities. Guides from past seasons are also available to download from the website.

Geoff Elliott & Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, Artistic Directors Administrative Office: 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale, CA 91204 Administration: Tel 818.240.0910 / FAX 818.240.0826 Website: www.anoisewithin.org Box Office: 818.240.0910 ext.1
Compiled and Written by Samantha Starr Production Photography by Craig Schwartz Graphic Design by Christopher Komuro

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A Noise Within Study Guide

Photo by Craig Schwartz.

Charles Dickens Oliver Twist

A Noise Withins 2008/2009

Californias Home for the Classics

Funding for A Noise Withins Educational Programs is provided in part by:

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Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Oliver Twist

Olivers reception by Fagin and the boys. Illustration by George Cruikshank.

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A Biography of Charles Dickens

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Oliver Twist and The Heros Journey

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Timeline of Child Labor in Dickensian England

A child works in a coal mine as a coal tub puller.

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THE TREATMENT OF CHILD LABORERS

Testimonies of Child Workers in the Coal Mines of Gawber, England

CHILD LABOR IN 2008

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Dickens Oliver Twist: An Interview with Neil Bartlett

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Set design by Kurt Boetcher.

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Staging Dickens: Making A New Stage Version of Oliver Twist

Oliver amazed at the Dodgers mode of going to work.

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This is a story with a single over-riding desire; to find a

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Oliver with a Twist

A scene from the London production, directed by Neil Bartlett.

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Vocabulary from Oliver Twist

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VISUAL ARTS: Creating the World of Oliver Twist

Please, sir, I want some more. Illustration by George Cruikshank, 1837

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Uncle Sam recruiting poster, painted by James Montgomery Flagg 1916-17.

John Bull World War I Recruiting Poster, 1915.

The Music of Oliver Twist

Featuring Composer David O

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About Theatre Arts

Theatre Vocabulary Being an Audience Member

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About A Noise Within

Californias Home for the Classics

Californias Home for the Classics

Californias Home for the Classics

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