A dramatic 'Twist'

CAMBRIDGE -- In one terrifying scene in "Oliver Twist," the young protagonist is dragged screaming through a dark alley in the worst section of London, as his two kidnappers from the underworld muscle him back to their lair. In the next paragraph Charles Dickens addresses the reader: "If you had heard the screams, would you have cared?"

That scene was one of the challenges of adapting the novel for the stage, says Neil Bartlett, who is bringing his acclaimed 2004 British production to the American Repertory Theatre this week. When Dickens leaps from an emotionally shocking scene to a dispassionate authorial voice, how does a director follow?

Bartlett had the actors sing.

"That constant turning aside to the reader, I wanted to keep," he says, munching on olives, bread, and cheese before a rehearsal here. "Often at key points, the company stops dead in their tracks and turns to the audience and sings Dickens' prose, set to melodies of 1830s and 1840 [s] , rearranged by us."

Using Dickensian language, Victorian music-hall tunes, and a set inspired by period children's toys called penny dreadful machines, Bartlett and a team of collaborators have created a highly theatricalized version of the novel. It begins previews Saturday.

As he ate lunch, Bartlett talked about the challenges of adaptation. Most people know the story, so a director changes it at his peril. And from a technical standpoint, how does one boil down an enormous novel containing dozens of characters and multiple settings into a play that runs two hours?

"Audiences want you to deliver the story they know and love," Bartlett explains. "You can't have a production of 'Oliver Twist' in which [Oliver] doesn't say, 'Please, sir, I want more.' You'd have complaints at the box office."

But while satisfying audience's expectations, he says, he had to follow his own dramatic instinct about what was essential.

"The plot can be boiled down to one idea, which is: ' The orphan is found by his family.' But Dickens' great trick is that before [Oliver] is finally safe in the arms of his true family, he's embraced by a series of surrogate parents from hell."

Those parents include the comic Bumbles , the mistreating Sowerberry undertakers , as well as the underworld gang: boss Fagin and his band of boy pickpockets , and the two kidnappers, the horrific Bill Sykes and his girlfriend, Nancy, a teenage prostitute. Dickens created a battle for the heart and mind of Oliver between those "families" and the good one -- the proper, middle-class Mr. Brownlow , who takes in the orphan after he's been unjustly accused of theft, and his daughter, Rose.

All of these characters inhabit wildly disparate settings: a workshop, an undertaker's office, the Brownlows' s smart home in late-Georgian Pentonville , Fagin's den, the rooftops of London, and Nancy's garret. Dickens could leap between these various scenes merely by turning a page. The stage version, says Bartlett, required a "storytelling machine" that could move equally fast.

Enter Rae Smith , a London designer with whom he's collaborated for many years. (Both last worked at ART in 2005 in "Dido, Queen of Carthage." ) The pair thought the trickiest part would be pulling off the hanging of Sykes. They remembered that the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud's famous London waxworks had a hanging scene. When they visited they found what they were looking for as well as a sense of overall atmosphere for the show.

"It felt right," Bartlett says. "The strange, old-fashioned Grand Guignol , the scary, the gothic, the horrible things that lurk in basements. It felt like it might be Fagin's natural habitat."

They fell in love with the museum's collection of penny dreadful machines: small glass-fronted boxes with scenes inside, designed as children's toys in the 19th century. Put in a penny and something dreadful happens, like Mary, Queen of Scots getting her head cut off by a little toy ax.

Smith designed the "Oliver" set as a giant penny dreadful machine. It starts out as a rather grimy, empty box, but then hidden parts move to change the environment.

"It's really a collection of mechanized tricks," says Gideon Lester, ART associate artistic director , who saw the show in London. "Trap doors, winches, flaps that open. It's very stagy, there's nothing realistic about it. It represents the underworld, so it's not clean."

Lester says he was amazed at the theatricality of that production. "Part of Dickens' s skill is you never know what's going to happen next. And Neil has managed to capture that in theatrical terms. The production can move from scenes of great tragedy and suspense to low comedy on a dime."

To do that, Bartlett says he needed "a talented team of actors who could move through at a real lick." Some 30-40 characters are played by 13 actors, among them ART company members Thomas Derrah , Karen MacDonald , Remo Airaldi , and Will LeBow , who switch back and forth between genteel and low-down characters, with accents to match. Only Michael Wartella , as Oliver, and Ned Eisenberg , as Fagin, play one role.

Bartlett also collaborated with composer Gerard McBurney , who developed an original score from music hall songs, opera, and melodramatic operetta. Music adapter and director Simon Deacon developed the score further in rehearsal. Movement director Struan Leslie was also part of the original team.

The play was first performed in 2004 at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, where Bartlett was artistic director. He's also a performer, director, translator , and novelist. He's adapted the works of Balzac, Dumas, Wilde, Shakespeare , and Dickens -- "Oliver Twist" was the second of three Dickens works he's adapted. This one, he says, has continued in public favor for 180 years because it asks a pertinent question: " 'Is the world safe for children?' And that is a question we have not yet answered," he says. "To put it mildly."

It's pretty clear that Bartlett's production will have little in common with Lionel Bart's 1968 chirpy musical film "Oliver!" although it may be closer in tone to Roman Polanski's dark 2005 film. Yet this is not intended as an adults-only play.

"I made the show because my best friend . . . said, 'I want to bring my [10-year-old] son to see your staging of 'Oliver Twist,' " says Bartlett.

And it's funny? "Oh God, yes! It's Oliver Twist. It's Mr. and Mrs. Bumble. It's a fantastic story for children."

He adds, "It ends with the most heartfelt happy ending in English fiction: 'The child was safe at last.' "

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.