The Dickens Musical on Stage and Screen

Anthony Barker University of Aveiro “Consider Yourself One of Us”: The Dickens Musical on Stage and Screen A BSTR A CT Charles Dickens’s work has been taken and adapted for many different ends. Quite a lot of attention has been given to film and television versions of the novels, many of which are very distinguished. The stage and screen musical based on his work, essentially a product of the last fifty years, has been neither as studied nor as respected. This paper looks at the con- nection between Dickens’s novels, the celebration of “London-ness” and its articulation in popular forms of working-class music and song. It will argue that potentially unpromising texts were taken and used to articulate pride and a sense of community for groups representing the disadvantaged of the East End and, more specifically, for first-generation Jewish settlers in London. This is all the more surprising as it was in the first instance through depictions of Oliver Twist and the problematic figure of Fagin that an Anglo-Jewish sensibility was able to express itself. Other texts by Dickens, notably Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol and The Old Curios- ity Shop, were also adapted to musical forms with varying results, but the period of their heyday was relatively short, as their use of traditional and communitarian forms gave place in the people’s affection to manufactured pop/rock and operetta forms. I will argue that this decline was partly the product of changing London demographics and shifts in theatre econom- ics and partly of the appropriation of Dickens by the academy. Keywords: Dickens, musical, stage, screen, Oliver! Anthony Barker In this article, I would like to attempt to recreate what the fiction of Dickens meant for many of the citizens and readers of London in the period around 1960. By so doing, I hope to be able to characterize the particular shape and style of the musical adaptations of his work which came upon the stage over the following twenty years. Finally, I briefly review the period after 1980 when the nature of musical Dickens seemed to darken and respond to other communal expectations. So, in pursuance of my first objective, here is an extract from a family memoir by the poet and children’s writer Michael Rosen: We are on holiday on the coast of Yorkshire, not far from Whitby. It’s a campsite and there are two families . It is 1959 and I am 13. 242 So we sit ourselves down on sleeping bags, blankets and cushions. The tilley lamp sits on a fold-up wooden chair, my father sits on another in the middle of us. Looking around the tent, I can only see our faces catch- ing the light, as if we are just masks hanging there, our bodies left out- side in the dark perhaps. In my father’s hand is a book—Great Expecta- tions—and every night, there in the tent, he reads it to us. Without any hesitation, backtracking or explanation he reads Pip’s story in the voice of the secondary-school teacher he is, but each and every character is given a flavour—some more than others: Magwitch, of course, allows him to do his native cockney. Thinking about it now, I can see that his Jaggers was probably based on a suburban headteacher from one of the schools he taught in; Un- cle Pumblechook could have been derived from the strangely pompous shopkeepers and publicans who peopled the hardware stores and cafés of outer London, where we lived in the 1950s. But over the years, as my father tells us about his own upbringing, some of Dickens characters start to mix and merge with our own relatives. (2) In this passage about a school teacher doing not just the police in different voices (which is, I must say, only one of a number of detailed connections he establishes), Rosen makes clear the extraordinary bond which existed between the fiction of Dickens and the life narratives of Londoners of Jewish extraction in the middle years of the twentieth century. In another passage, he reads his father Harold’s rendering of Trabb’s boy from Great Expectations, and his catch-phrase “Don’t know yer!” as an expres- sion of repressed guilt about escaping family and social connections in the East End and even further eastward, associations which are embarrassing and redolent of hardship. As he writes: “Consider Yourself One of Us”: The Dickens Musical In the shuffling of the pack of these East End boys, each in their own different ways got what they needed to leave this place, to move northwards or eastwards to get out of this poverty and foreignness, to become less “heimish,” as it was called—the “heim” being the mythical faraway place in eastern Europe where everyone looked and talked like their grandpar- ents, lived in tiny houses and kept chickens. (Rosen 5) The history I would like to relate is exactly about this desire to move onward and upward from these roots, again using Dickens as a vehicle, and again releasing in the process complex emotional reactions of longing, affection, loyalty and guilt. It is the history of the Dickens stage musical and it concerns itself essentially with the period 1960 to 1975. The Dickens musical of this period was exclusively the creation of Londoners and almost 243 exclusively the creation of London’s East End Jewish community. Their life experiences and cultural styles inform the stage musical at this time, and bring in an unprecedentedly successful period for British musical artists. Before 1960, the stage musical was with very few exceptions an American art form. Hardly any British musical, and there were not many, travelled well. The Boyfriend (1954) by Sandy Wilson had some impact in London and New York but Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds’s London success Salad Days (also 1954) was too parochial and class-bound to be staged else- where (see Lerner 199). Since the early 1970s, the native British musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber have vied with the American musicals (of his great rival Stephen Sondheim but also of many other talents) for hegemony. Af- ter the society musicals of Ivor Novello and Noël Coward and before Lloyd Webber, there was really only the cockney musical of the 1960s and its curi- ous affinity with Dickens. East End songwriters and composers began to emerge, mostly from the Music Hall tradition, in the mid-1950s. They rose to prominence following the first wave of British pop music, centring on the vocal styles of Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and An- thony Newley, a stable of singers managed in emulation of Elvis Presley’s management by Col Tom Parker by British impresario Larry Parnes. Best among the new brigade of writers was the Stepney-born Lionel Begleiter, son of a Jewish tailor from Lvov in Poland (now Ukraine), better known as Lionel Bart, who changed his name to Bart after passing Bart’s Hospi- tal in London aboard a bus. Bart had played in a band with Tommy Steele and Mike Pratt, and was responsible for such hits as “Living Doll” and “The Young Ones” for Cliff Richards, “Little White Bull” and “Rock with the Caveman” for Tommy Steele, “Do You Mind!” for Anthony Newley and the Bond theme “From Russia with Love” for Matt Monro. Anthony Barker Bart had no musical training at all but he was a very gifted lyricist. His career took off when he provided the lyrics for the inaugural Mermaid Theatre production of a Henry Fielding adaptation Lock Up Your Daugh- ters (1959), with music supplied by bandleader and film composer Laurie Johnson. Also working on this show were director Peter Coe and stage designer Sean Kenny. Lock Up Your Daughters ran for six months and was made into a bawdy (but not musical) film in the late 1960s. On the basis of his work here, his song-writing for films and performing with the Unity Theatre earlier in the decade, Bart was invited to provide music and lyrics for the Theatre Workshop production of Fings ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. Both Unity and Theatre Workshop grew out of working-class leftist movements of the mid-century. Their leading lights, like Joan Lit- 244 tlewood and Evan McColl, were regularly monitored (and ostracized) for their communist sympathies. Fings was a Brechtian raunchy celebration of the east London underworld. Based on a memoir of his gang- land experiences by ex-con Frank Norman, the behaviour of gamblers, pimps, tarts and bent coppers was palliated by lively up-tempo music and song from Bart. Theatre Workshop’s method under Joan Littlewood was improvisational, which was just as well because Frank Norman himself was barely literate. The show was put together in little over a fortnight. A successful Theatre Royal Stratford East production was followed rap- idly by three more, one of which was a lucrative West End transfer. As both composer and lyricist this time, and working alongside fellow East Ender soul-mates and wholly in his native argot, Bart was able to make his name in musical theatre. The tale is told that Lionel Bart never at any time read Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The musical Oliver!, the book, lyrics and music for which were all written by Bart, was based essentially on David Lean’s 1948 movie, which Bart had seen and admired when in the army doing National Service. These were Bart’s most fertile years and he was looking for a follow-up success.

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